Bios update failed. It went 100% and at the bottom said ME FW Update Failed: Internal error: FWU_Buffer. Someone else had posted this image on Dells support forum. But there system still worked after. Where mine just the fans spin black screen and the power button blinks orange with 3 long blinks and a pause. I took a pic of the spi header and there is two spi flash eeproms one is 8mb and the other is 4mb and the extracted .hdr (from update exe) is 13mb. The bios version was A11 and i was trying to update to A18 (latest) What i want to figure out is if i can somehow flash the hdr to one ot both of these flash chips or would i need to find a donor motherboard to dump the chips and clone it? Any help would be very appreciated. I have also tried numerous recovery steps like holding END key while booting up with usb stick formatted to fat32 and some other recovery tricks that dont seem to work with this model Optiplex.
8MB s bios. 4 mb is EC and misc. make backup with spi programmer.. then compare to dload hdr in hex editor. did you try booting USB dos ? reset cmos.. or take power out and hold power button 20 secs ? Posted by Christoph_vW on 8 Sep 2014 1:48 AM The issue was fixed with BIOS A19 (for the Standard Optiplex 9010) other models will follow. The BIOS has to be flashed twice! make hirens boot usb (or rufus freedos or yumi usb tool) and in menu in dos tools.. by size. no ram drive and then type c: (press enter) now type dir ( press enter.. should see the bios file.. root of USB drive.) type the filename (no need to type .exe )
Is the hdr a raw format like a rom or bin? Also, i remember when i got that ME FW Update Failed: Internal error: FWU_Buffer error, afterwords it said in bright neon green text that the bios updated sucessfully and then it rebooted. So i am thinking that the 8mb flash chip containes the A18 bios but the 4mb flash chip failed to update ME and still contains the A11 version ME. Sorry if i am not making a whole lot of sense, these newer bioses are new to me. I am use to pulling old plcc socket bios chips and programming with a willem.
its mixed.. part bios part EC.. compare backup.bin of original with hex editor the hdr and you will see eventually where it splits off. i just copy and paste then file> save as> test.bin and burn youll do fine. the 4mb is the EC with ME issue. try cmos reset and boot usb dos to flash A19 or A20 as A18 still had the ME update issue for some cheap USB programer CH341A makes it easy. the header pins missing might be proprietary as it has 9 not 8 pins... best to do straight to chip solder wires no longer than 1ft6in... tin the tips of wires first, makes it easier. BACKUP FIRST both chips. then we can fix that .bin file with hxd editor and the hdr file. dinner time..
Yes i tried clearing the cmos and removed that battery, ram, power cord, holding power button for 30 seconds. I still get a blank screen and no activity on the keyboards (usb and ps2) and also not led activity on the usb pen drive that is fat32 formatted and the HDR in the root dir. I have also added a bunch of renamed files that have worked for previous Dell recovery methods. Also, i forgot to mention this is the AIO version and the latest bios is A18 , not A19 or A20.
Thank you very much for your help. I ordered that very same USB programmer earlier today along with a SOIC8 test clip just to make things easier. I am use to desoldering with Chip Quik. I might get impatient and end up desoldering though. I have a Arduino Uno collecting dust that could be used as a usb spi flasher.....what to do, what to do. Enjoy your dinner.
not sure of arduino trick to read spi bios.. never used it but heard of it. try ctrl home with hdr renamed 1APTC022.rom or System30.rom 00467000.rom 467000.rom
I tried System30.rom and 00467000.rom with no luck using END and ctrl+home. I didnt try renaming to 1APTC022.rom or 467000.rom so i will give it a try. I am wondering if i am not getting the timing right, or if this recovery method just is not viable with this model Optiplex.
Still no usb led activity. I did notice when i just plug it in the cpu fan spins slow and quiet. But when i plug the usb stick in and hold down combinations of different keys, Sometimes the cpu fan spins fast, then slow, fast then slow. But no led activity on usb.
Got that ch341a programmer today but the software it came with does not have a selection for the W25Q64FVSIG. Getting unknown for ID , manufacture,ect..ect Is there a newer DataBase.Dat file that has my chips device info?
Ok I figured out i had to desolder the chip from the motherboard and read it directly on the programmer. I made two reads and both reads are identical. Now I need to figure out how to find the raw bios data inside the .hdr file. Does anyone have any tips, on what strings to look for?
Yeah i am using HxD but im not sure where the starting point is because the first few bytes of the backup bin are not found in the .hdr , I did find the end of the backup bin in the .hdr but it sucks going backwards row by row trying to find where it changes. Here is the backup. h t t ps://www dot sendspace dot com/file/c823b1 Sorry need 20 post to create links
in hex 0x2584C0 is where the backup bin starts to match the A18 .hdr @ 0x41542534 (that was in oct) in hex its 0x30CC25C
so how do i find the actual .rom/bin data so i can write it to the 8mb chip? Yes i made a backup of that aswell. Here h t t ps:// www dot sendspace dot com/file/2tli2e
in A11 bios find 7GdK then find in your bios backup.. see the matching now ? not all matches.. breaks into a few parts. (normal on some cases) found something different.. whats your Language st on pc bios ? A11 dload $MMELOCL_EN yours $MMELOCL_CHS oops nevermind found the similar match. workign on it.. ill have a test.bin to flash soon
I found that string in the backup bin but its not even near the start of the file. I still dont know where to copy and paste into a new .bin file so i can write it to the chip. English, atleast it should be.