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THINKPAD Bios check - repair

Posted: Thu Apr 02, 2020 11:30 am
by gtiporter
Hello

I have a Lenovo Yoga X1 Carbon THINKPAD i7-6600U. 2.6ghz.

Motherboard is 00JT811

I was prompted to update the bios several weeks ago and it hung for about 50 minutes. After that, it wouldn't boot and although i could get into the bios, I couldn't get past it, despite trying so many things found on the internet. It had a repair option in the bios but it didn't actually work.

Anyway - i got a new motherboard and swapped it out and all was fine until i got blinking yellow power light a few days ago and it doesn't now power up at all and I cant fix that even by removing the battery, cmos battery or pressing in the tiny hole at the back of the computer. I assume it is fried. Perhaps I bought a dodgy motherboard!

I would like to see if I can fix the original motherboard by flashing it's bios chip (which I assume is the problem) with a ch341a programmer. I have taken a bios dump of the bios using this chip which I have here:-

https://englandandco-my.sharepoint.com/ ... Q?e=rse0zD

Can anyone hep with what I do next. I was going to try flashing the old board chip with the new board bios chip but I can only get FF's from reading this which is maybe because it's fried?

Any help would be appreciated. I have nothing to lose by trying something.

Re: THINKPAD Bios check - repair

Posted: Fri Apr 03, 2020 1:01 am
by gtiporter
Ok. Have now managed to get a bios dump from the 2nd motherboard that has a power issue. It's a verified dump but I'll double check the 2 readings I got are the same and I'll flash my original board and say some prayers

You never know

Nothing to lose.

I note that this bios dump has some lines with just ff's on it but I'm assuming that might be normal. Never seen a healthy bios dump before so I dont know what it looks like

Re: THINKPAD Bios check - repair

Posted: Fri Apr 03, 2020 4:41 pm
by edwin
your original bios chip from the badly flashed board might have been emptied during the flash procedure when it hung because the bios update utility in windows wasn't started as administrator. you may have issues with bad serial numbers and the like but at least it will boot until a point where that can be corrected with other tooling.