Enrolling Warranty Repaired Chromebooks

[Seth Mayo]

Recently we had two Acer C720P Chromebooks repaired and have run into a problem we've never seen before.

In this case, both Chromebooks ended up with their motherboards replaced.  This has meant that we have needed to de-provision the old serial and then enrol these 'new' Chromebooks.  However, when we tried to do this we received an error stating "Oops. The system failed to determine device identifiers for this device.".  We assume this has to do with the fact that the hard drive wasn't replaced and still has record of the previous system board and the previous serial numbers.

From there we tried to do a recovery to reset the machine back to factory but even with the USB recovery method, the system will not restore properly.  Instead in recovery we receive the message "gbb.flags is nonzero: 0x00000039 read-only firmware id: Google_Peppy.4389.89.0 active firmware id: Google_Peppy.4389.89.0'.

We are out of ideas.  Both machines have done exactly the same thing.  Do we get Acer back out?  Has anyone seen this before?  It definitely seems related to a hard drive containing information that doesn't match the new system board - but how do you solve that if you can't recover?

Any help would be greatly appreciated!

Kind Regards,

Seth Mayo
IT Technical Manager
DID: 02 8203 1368

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[Antony Street]

Seth,

Last week we had some Acer 730's have their mainboard replaced. I was talking with the tech and he told me that he has a special flashing tool that puts the old serial number on the new board. Before they are flashed, the have no serial or something like that. 

From your description, my stab at a cause would be that the tech forgot to do that flashing which has left your device with a non-standard ROM and no serial.

Just a guess.

Antony

Antony Street IT Manager - IT Department Thornlie Christian College 19 Furley Road, Southern River WA 6110 P: +61 8 9455 1607 M: +61 488 056 617

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[chris.beattie]

Yep, would second Antony's guess - this is very similar to an issue we had with one of our mainboard-replaced C730s; when starting up the machine on the new mainboard, there's a USB-boot tool that is used to set some core things, among them the serial number.

On one of our repairs the Tech had entered a string from a random sticker on the bottom of the machine that wasn't the machine's actual serial or a recognisable serial to the Chrome management console.  We tried for ages to get the USB-boot tool to work again but I think it's designed in such a way that it activates the secure boot once it's done and so renders itself unusable again.  We ended up having to order a second replacement mainboard and go through the process again to set the correct serial; there was no other way around it as the flash storage is integrated with the board.

It's a good idea in principle as it means you don't need to deactivate any licenses when replacing a mainboard; it just starts up ready to go.  If you get it wrong or miss it out though, then you're in trouble.

Hope this helps!

[Matthew Notley]

Hi Seth,

You might want to try the following, this sometimes resolves this issue for us by resetting the GBB flags back to default (which is 0).

KB0015:
If chromebook imaging or recovery functionality is damaged, often after a repair job, or locked in development mode, and the GBB values are also not zero (press tab at the damaged image screen) do the following:

1. Log into a non-enterprise account

2. Once logged in, at the desktop, Open crosh with key combination: ctrl+alt+t

3. Type: shell

4. Type: sudo /usr/share/vboot/bin/set_gbb_flags.sh 0

5. Reboot and confirm GBB error has gone

6. Reflash Chrome OS using Recovery Stick
7. Attempt to re-enroll device into enterprise

If the above doesn't work, you will need an Acer tech to run the RMA SHIM utility to re-serialize the device. Only Acer techs have this tool.
We have over 1000 Chromebooks in our enterprise, and have run into this issue on 20-30 devices. Most times the GBB flag reset method fixes the issue.

Cheers,
Matt.

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[Renier Nel]

Hi Matt

I followed your steps and it did seem to fix one part of the problem. Unfortunately the device is still unable to determine the device identifiers so I think we will need to get Acer Tech out to run the utility that you have mentioned.

Thanks for the advice though, it is a great piece of info to have.

Regards,

Renier Nel | IT Technical Assistant
PH: 02 4627 2990 | DID: 02 8203 1368