From 8b2219bfa2da36e7809588ef723a10483a6e137f Mon Sep 17 00:00:00 2001
From: Francis Rowe Or go back to main index
- You still have Lenovo BIOS, or you had libreboot running and you flashed another ROM; and you had bucts 1 set and
- the ROM wasn't dd'd.* or if Lenovo BIOS was present and libreboot wasn't flashed.
- In this scenario, you compiled a ROM that had an incorrect configuration, or there is an actual bug preventing your machine from
- booting. Or, maybe, you set BUC.TS to 0 and shut down after first flash while Lenovo BIOS was running. In any case, your machine is bricked and will not boot at all.
-
- "Unbricking" means flashing a known-good (working) ROM. The problem: you can't boot the machine, making this difficult. In this situation, external hardware (see hardware requirements above) is needed which can flash the SPI chip (where libreboot resides).
-
- Remove those screws:
- Push the keyboard forward (carefully):
- Lift the keyboard up and disconnect it from the board:
- Grab the right-hand side of the chassis and force it off (gently) and pry up the rest of the chassis:
- You should now have this:
- Disconnect the wifi antenna cables, the modem cable and the speaker:
- Unroute the cables along their path, carefully lifting the tape that holds them in place. Then, disconnect the modem
- cable (other end) and power connection and unroute all the cables so that they dangle by the monitor hinge on the right-hand
- side:
- Disconnect the monitor from the motherboard, and unroute the grey antenna cable, carefully lifting the tape
- that holds it into place:
- Carefully lift the remaining tape and unroute the left antenna cable so that it is loose:
- Remove the screw that is highlighted (do NOT remove the other one; it holds part of the heatsink (other side) into place):
- Remove those screws:
- Carefully remove the plate, like so:
- Remove the SATA connector:
- Now remove the motherboard (gently) and cast the lcd/chassis aside:
- Lift back that tape and hold it with something. Highlighted is the SPI flash chip:
- At this point, you should wire up your programmer according to it's documentation. For me, this was (see: "SparkFun cable pin reference"):
- My programmer, usb cable and clip:Unbricking the ThinkPad X60
-
- Table of Contents
-
-
-
- Hardware requirements
-
-
-
- Software requirements
-
-
-
- Brick type 1: bucts not reset.
-
-
- In this case, unbricking is easy: reset BUC.TS to 0 by removing that yellow cmos coin (it's a battery) and putting it back after a minute or two:
-
-
- *Those dd commands should be applied to all newly compiled X60 ROM's (the ROM's in libreboot binary archives already have this applied!):
- dd if=coreboot.rom of=top64k.bin bs=1 skip=$[$(stat -c %s coreboot.rom) - 0x10000] count=64k
- dd if=coreboot.rom bs=1 skip=$[$(stat -c %s coreboot.rom) - 0x20000] count=64k | hexdump
- dd if=top64k.bin of=coreboot.rom bs=1 seek=$[$(stat -c %s coreboot.rom) - 0x20000] count=64k conv=notrunc
- (doing this makes the ROM suitable for use when flashing a machine that still has Lenovo BIOS running,
- using those instructions: http://www.coreboot.org/Board:lenovo/x60/Installation.
- bad rom (or user error), machine won't boot
-
-
-
-
-
-
-
-
-
-
-
-
-
-
-
-
-
-
-
-
-
-
-
-
-
-
-
-
-
-
-
- http://dangerousprototypes.com/docs/Common_Bus_Pirate_cable_pinouts.
- Correlating with the following information, I was able to wire up my pirate correctly:
- http://flashrom.org/Bus_Pirate#Connections
- And by following that advice:
- http://www.coreboot.org/Board:lenovo/x60/Installation#Howto.
- Note: that last page says to wire up only those 5 pins (see below) like that: 1, 2, 4, 5, 6.
- Note: and then, for power it says (on that coreboot.org page) to connect the power jack to the board and connect the
- AC adapter (without powering on the board).
- Note: I ignored that advice, and wired up all 8 pins. And it worked.
-
- Here is the pinout (correlate it with your programmer's documentation):
-
-
-
- My programmer (bus pirate):
-
- My clip (pomona 5250):
-
- My USB mini a to b cable:
-
- Connecting the pomona:
-
- Connecting the USB cable from programmer to 2nd(working/non-bricked) computer, my T60:
-
- Programmer is now active:
-
- Now I install flashrom on the T60 (running Trisquel GNU/Linux) and do this:
- flashrom -p buspirate_spi:dev=/dev/ttyUSB0 -w bin/x60/libreboot_usqwerty.rom
- Note: there are also other ROM images for X60
- Note: this is using buspirate as the programmer, so it is flashing the X60, not the T60!
- Here's my terminal window on the T60:
-
- So, you should see the following:
- --
-
- flashrom v0.9.5.2-r1517 on Linux 3.2.0-61-generic (i686), built with libpci 3.1.8, GCC 4.6.3, little endian
- flashrom is free software, get the source code at http://www.flashrom.org
-
- Calibrating delay loop... delay loop is unreliable, trying to continue OK.
- Found Macronix flash chip "MX25L1605" (2048 kB, SPI) on buspirate_spi.
- Reading old flash chip contents... done.
- Erasing and writing flash chip... Erase/write done.
- Verifying flash... VERIFIED.
-
- --
- At the end it says "VERIFIED", which means that the procedure worked. If you see this, it means
- that you can put your X60 back together. So let's do that now.
-
- Remove the programmer and put it away somewhere. Put back the tape and press firmly over it:
-
-
- Your empty chassis:
-
-
- Put the motherboard back in:
-
-
- Reconnect SATA:
-
-
- Put the plate back and re-insert those screws:
-
-
- Re-route that antenna cable around the fan and apply the tape:
-
-
- Route the cable here and then (not shown, due to error on my part) reconnect the monitor cable to the motherboard
- and re-insert the screws:
-
-
- Re-insert that screw:
-
-
- Route the black antenna cable like so:
-
-
- Tuck it in neatly like so:
-
-
- Route the modem cable like so:
-
-
- Connect modem cable to board and tuck it in neatly like so:
-
-
- Route the power connection and connect it to the board like so:
-
-
- Route the antenna and modem cables neatly like so:
-
-
- Connect the wifi antenna cables. At the start of the tutorial, this machine had an Intel wifi chip. Here you see I've replaced it with an
- Atheros AR5B95 (supports 802.11n and can be used without blobs):
-
-
- Connect the modem cable:
-
-
- Connect the speaker:
-
-
- You should now have this:
-
-
- Re-connect the upper chassis:
-
-
- Re-connect the keyboard:
-
-
- Re-insert the screws that you removed earlier:
-
-
- Power on!
-
-
- Trisquel live USB menu (using GRUB's ISOLINUX parser):
-
-
- Trisquel live desktop:
-
-
- Copyright © 2014 Francis Rowe <info@gluglug.org.uk>
- This document is released under the Creative Commons Attribution-ShareAlike 4.0 International Public License and all future versions.
- A copy of the license can be found at ../license.txt.
-
- This document is distributed in the hope that it will be useful, - but WITHOUT ANY WARRANTY; without even the implied warranty of - MERCHANTABILITY or FITNESS FOR A PARTICULAR PURPOSE. See ../license.txt for more information. -
- - - -- cgit v1.2.3-70-g09d2