Unfortunately you need to disassemble your Amilo Xi 3650 completely in order to get to the BIOS chip. It is the same if your CR2032 CMOS battery runs out of power because then the notebook will not start. Buy a CMOS battery with plug because the battery is not socketed. Alternatively you may use a CR2032 with soldering lugs. The BIOS chip is marked with a blue dot and it has a notch to mark pin #1 for flashing as you can see from the images. The AF82801IEM chip at the bottom near the BIOS chip is an ICH9 I/O controller. You can thus flash the BIOS chip with ch341a programmer (though a Raspberry Pi should also suffice AFAIK). Here is a description of the programmer. If you want to use it with flashrom -p ch341a_spi -r/w image.flashrom you need to put the upper jumper in I2C/SPI mode. The bottom two jumpers should be as shown in the linked image in 3V3 position. The pins at the right need to be connected by female-female jumper cables to a SPI clipper which can be fixed on the BIOS chip. The datasheet for the flash chip can be found here. See for our general considerations if you wanna set up the ch341a to flash the W25X16 of the Xi 3650.
That day I was about to try write support for flashrom with the Xi 3650 BIOS and see whether it would work. The two images used for write were not too different (the only difference was a BIOS setting letting you choose between the on-board graphics card and an Nvidia Geforce 9600M GT). Nonetheless it seems to have written (and erased) at least one block of the BIOS ROM correctly. In the meanwhile the FTS Amilo Xi 3650 is in the whitelist of flashrom so that you do not need the force_I_want_a_brick parameter.
Proceeding anyway because user forced us to. Found chipset "Intel ICH9M-E". Enabling flash write... OK. Found Winbond flash chip "W25X16" (2048 kB, SPI) at physical address 0xffe00000. Reading flash... done. root@sysresccd /usb/Xi3650-BIOS/flashrom-T6400 % ls intermediate Xi3650-T6400-1.0B-1646-0020.rom Xi3650-T6400-1.0H-1646-0024-IGD-2ndflash.rom root@sysresccd /usb/Xi3650-BIOS/flashrom-T6400 % cmp Xi3650-T6400-1.0H-1646-0024-IGD-2ndflash.rom intermediate/Xi3650-T6400-1.0H-1646-0024-IGD.rom Xi3650-T6400-1.0H-1646-0024-IGD-2ndflash.rom intermediate/Xi3650-T6400-1.0H-1646-0024-IGD.rom differ: char 1575900, line 3706 root@sysresccd /usb/Xi3650-BIOS/flashrom-T6400 % ls intermediate Xi3650-T6400-1.0B-1646-0020.rom Xi3650-T6400-1.0H-1646-0024-IGD-2ndflash.rom root@sysresccd /usb/Xi3650-BIOS/flashrom-T6400 % flashrom -p internal:laptop=force_I_want_a_brick --write intermediate/Xi3650-T6400-1.0H-1646-0024-Nvidia.rom flashrom v0.9.7-r1711 on Linux 3.14.50-std460-amd64 (x86_64) flashrom is free software, get the source code at http://www.flashrom.org Calibrating delay loop... OK. ======================================================================== WARNING! You seem to be running flashrom on an unsupported laptop. Laptops, notebooks and netbooks are difficult to support and we recommend to use the vendor flashing utility. The embedded controller (EC) in these machines often interacts badly with flashing. See the manpage and http://www.flashrom.org/Laptops for details. If flash is shared with the EC, erase is guaranteed to brick your laptop and write may brick your laptop. Read and probe may irritate your EC and cause fan failure, backlight failure and sudden poweroff. You have been warned. ======================================================================== Proceeding anyway because user forced us to. Found chipset "Intel ICH9M-E". Enabling flash write... OK. Found Winbond flash chip "W25X16" (2048 kB, SPI) at physical address 0xffe00000. Reading old flash chip contents... done. Erasing and writing flash chip... Erase/write done. Verifying flash... VERIFIED. root@sysresccd /usb/Xi3650-BIOS/flashrom-T6400 % flashrom -p internal:laptop=force_I_want_a_brick --write Xi3650-T6400-1.0H-1646-0024-IGD-2ndflash.rom flashrom v0.9.7-r1711 on Linux 3.14.50-std460-amd64 (x86_64) flashrom is free software, get the source code at http://www.flashrom.org Calibrating delay loop... OK. ======================================================================== WARNING! You seem to be running flashrom on an unsupported laptop. Laptops, notebooks and netbooks are difficult to support and we recommend to use the vendor flashing utility. The embedded controller (EC) in these machines often interacts badly with flashing. See the manpage and http://www.flashrom.org/Laptops for details. If flash is shared with the EC, erase is guaranteed to brick your laptop and write may brick your laptop. Read and probe may irritate your EC and cause fan failure, backlight failure and sudden poweroff. You have been warned. ======================================================================== Proceeding anyway because user forced us to. Found chipset "Intel ICH9M-E". Enabling flash write... OK. Found Winbond flash chip "W25X16" (2048 kB, SPI) at physical address 0xffe00000. Reading old flash chip contents... done. Erasing and writing flash chip... Erase/write done. Verifying flash... VERIFIED. root@sysresccd /usb/Xi3650-BIOS/flashrom-T6400 %
Lately I have tried > flashrom -p internal:laptop=force_I_want_a_brick --read Xi3650.rom on my Fujitsu Siemens Amilo Xi 3650 laptop and it has worked quite well. ... Found chipset "Intel ICH9M-E". Found Winbond flash chip "W25X16" (2048 kB, SPI) at physical address 0xffe00000. > sha256sum Xi3650.rom 8c5095d38bffe9b87d481ba8da395e48d9dcfadd43176979fd69e5da249b3763 Xi3650.rom BIOS (according to dmidecode) is Vendor: Phoenix Version: 1.0H-1646-0024 Release Date: 04/15/2010 I would love to see it under 'supported boards' in the future. More information can be found in the attachements.
general description: external BIOS flashing
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