T430 dead BIOS options?

[T i m]

Hi all,

I recently picked up a fairly clean T430 and after having it a day, I
thought I'd do what I generally do on most laptops (or desktops for
that matter) and I upgraded the BIOS.

It all seemed to be going ok, till I restarted the second time and I
ended up with the 5 quick beeps thing. ;-(

Long - short, I've stuck another mobo in it and it's running fine now
but I was wondering what the options were re repairing the original
board?

I also have a T430 board that could be used as a donor for the BIOS,
*if* such things are swappable? I read something about fingerprints
but whilst I'm ok at a practical / electronics level, I've not really
dealt with this sort of thing with anything that wasn't
'straightforward' before?

I've seen you can buy a pre-programmed BIOS on ebay but unsure if that
was possible for the T430's, or if I backup the BIOS from the working
machine, program it back to the dead board myself?

Along with doing any of the above for the S&G's, it might be good to
have a spare board etc?

Any thoughts or pointers please?

Cheers, T i m

[visiblink]

T i m <ne...@spaced.me.uk> Wrote in message:

If I had this problem, I'd post the question on
forum.thinkpads.com. Realblackstuff or ajkula66 will know the
answer.
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[T i m]

Thanks for the heads up. I assumed there may be somewhere else (other
than Usenet) as it seemed fairly quiet on the Thinkpad newsgroups I've
checked so far. I'm just glad it's not on Facebook! ;-)

> Realblackstuff or ajkula66 will know the
> answer.

Registered. Thanks again,

Cheers, T i m

[Computer Nerd Kev]

T i m <ne...@spaced.me.uk> wrote:
>
> I also have a T430 board that could be used as a donor for the BIOS,
> *if* such things are swappable? I read something about fingerprints
> but whilst I'm ok at a practical / electronics level, I've not really
> dealt with this sort of thing with anything that wasn't
> 'straightforward' before?
>
> I've seen you can buy a pre-programmed BIOS on ebay but unsure if that
> was possible for the T430's, or if I backup the BIOS from the working
> machine, program it back to the dead board myself?

It looks like it will be a small serial Flash memory chip. You should
be able to pull it out, reprogram it in a dedicated programmer device
for such chips (might not be that expensive from Ebay), then pop it
back in. If the sellers of replacement chips are lying and there is
some code that has to match with the other hardware, this could be
read from the chip (assuming it at least got that far into the
programming) and replaced in the ROM image to be written back.

Getting the actual ROM image out from the BIOS programming software
could be another challenge, depending on how it's designed.

See:
https://flashrom.org/

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[Ralph Spitzner]

Well, with a pomona clip and a rasperry, you could reload/refresh the
spi eeprom....

[Ralph Spitzner]

Computer Nerd Kev wrote on 09/11/2018 09:46 AM:
> T i m <ne...@spaced.me.uk> wrote:
>>
>> I also have a T430 board that could be used as a donor for the BIOS,
>> *if* such things are swappable? I read something about fingerprints
>> but whilst I'm ok at a practical / electronics level, I've not really
>> dealt with this sort of thing with anything that wasn't
>> 'straightforward' before?
>>
>> I've seen you can buy a pre-programmed BIOS on ebay but unsure if that
>> was possible for the T430's, or if I backup the BIOS from the working
>> machine, program it back to the dead board myself?
>
> It looks like it will be a small serial Flash memory chip. You should
> be able to pull it out, reprogram it in a dedicated programmer device

its an 8 pin spi eeprom SMD, soldered....