insyde flash firmware tool on lenovo laptop

On my Windows 10 desktop, I ran the executable where it promptly threw an error that I needed to “Please connect the battery” and then exited. Since the laptop is “bricked” I can’t use that process, but I can extract the BIOS file from the executable. The program will automatically check that it’s on the proper machine and then rewrite the BIOS while the PC is still running. This comes as a Windows executable labeled 4BCN24WW.exe, and is intended to be run in a Windows environment on the S205 laptop. Thankfully the support documentation and downloads are still available on Lenovo’s website, including a BIOS update that is dated August 16th, 2011. So before going any further, I needed to find a “clean” version of the laptop’s BIOS to flash to the chip. The theory behind this fix is that the existing BIOS on the laptop’s board is somehow corrupted, and can be fixed by replacing it with a non-corrupted version. On board are all of the instructions for the computer’s BIOS. It uses a serial peripheral interface (SPI) for communication and has a capacity of 16,777,216 bits (2,097,152 bytes, or 2 mebibytes (MiB) for short). This identifies the chip as a Macronix MX25L1606E, M2I-12G variant in an 8-SOP package. The chip is stamped with the following information: The chip in question is located directly underneath the laptop’s keyboard and accessible by moving a small plastic flap out of the way (held in place with electrical tape in the above photo).

The target for this fix is a small flash memory chip on the laptop’s mainboard that contains the instructions which make up the computer’s BIOS. The solution was to reflash the BIOS chip with a replacement BIOS I found online, using an open source program called ‘flashrom’ and an Arduino acting as an SPI flash programmer. And since it was working perfectly fine up until it er, wasn’t… it seemed like a waste to just throw it out without trying my best to fix it. I’ve had this little Lenovo S205 netbook for a few years and although it’s gotten slower it’s always served me well. I tried everything I knew to fix it, including pulling the CMOS battery, reformatting the hard drive, and trying to ‘auto-flash’ the BIOS from a USB drive – nothing worked. Powering it on resulted only in a pure black screen where after approximately fifteen seconds it flashed “Lenovo Misto Ontario”, and then nothing. Shortly after changing a setting in the BIOS related to SATA operation, the laptop suddenly stopped working after rebooting. A few months ago I was attempting to reformat my laptop as a dual-boot machine with both Ubuntu and Windows 10 and I was having issues getting the boot manager to properly detect both operating systems.

Insyde flash firmware tool on lenovo laptop