Bios Recovery via Chip Reprogramming Supermicro X10SLM+-LN4F

[MasterIT]

Recovering Supermicro (or any other) bios

I made this write up For those of you that were unable to recover the bios of a supermicro board with the SUPER.ROM recovery procedure and have been unable to flash it via IPMI either, this should be a great help a if the only alternative you have is an RMA.


In order to do this you will need a chip programmer, and a soic clip or chip holder. And a soldering iron as well as flux.

The items I’ve specifically used are:

Revelprog-IS REVELPROG IS - Serial Device Programmer with USB interface

SOIC ZIF Adapter Adapter SOIC-8/DIL-8 200mil ZIF

MG Chemicals Flux Paste Syringe

Weller WE55Solder Station with screwdriver tip


I used the ‘wave solder’ method to remove the bios chip from the motherboard. The bios chip is usually near the CMOS battery and has 8 pins.

Once removed I cleaned the pins of excess solder and inserted the chip into my zif adapter and then into my programmer.

In order to read and write the chip you will need to read off the model number of the chip. it will be tiny, and likely covered with a sticker. In the case of the Supermicro X10SLM+-LN4F I was working on, the chip model was a Micron N25Q128A13 N25Q128A13ESEC0F TR Micron Technology Inc. | Integrated Circuits (ICs) | DigiKey

Once selecting the chip type in the programming software I read the data from the chip to confirm if it was corrupted and that the model of chip was correctly selected.

In my case the chip was entirely blank. (likely it failed to write the bios after erasing it, during a bios flashing) you know it’s blank as the text seen is all ‘FF’ or ‘00’


At this point I downloaded the latest bios update from supermicros website and opened the file in the programming tool

At this point I pressed ‘write buffer to memory’ this is the save icon superimposed ontop of the chip.

The programmer flashed the bios onto the chip and verified it burned properly.


I then re-soldered the chip onto the board and everything started working as it was previously.

Before

After

Hopefully this helps someone out.

 

[acquacow]

I just bought one on ebay that was pre-flashed and soldered it onto my X9 board.

I have a SOIC clip, but couldn't get an image to flash to the old/dead chip.

-- Dave

 

[MasterIT]

I just bought one on ebay that was pre-flashed and soldered it onto my X9 board.

I have a SOIC clip, but couldn't get an image to flash to the old/dead chip.

-- Dave

yeah, usually you would have to lift one of the pins in order to let you read and write from the board. i was not able to program it with the clip so i pulled the chip off entirely as i had the zif to read it directly too.


in my case i had the tools to do this but not the time to wait for an rma or a new chip from ebay/digikey

 

[nthu9280]

@MasterIT. Pretty cool. Was there some issue that prevented flashing the BIOS via IPMI in your case? Couple of years ago I had a board with broken IPMI. Wouldn't even boot without disabling it. But on the bright side, boot up was really quick.

 

[MasterIT]

@MasterIT. Pretty cool. Was there some issue that prevented flashing the BIOS via IPMI in your case? Couple of years ago I had a board with broken IPMI. Wouldn't even boot without disabling it. But on the bright side, boot up was really quick.

yeah, i was getting the 'could not set ME to Upgrade Mode' none of the jumpers on the board were any help so i was told i would have to send the board in. and we didn't have the time to wait for that to get done.

this whole process took 45 min at most.

 

[zir_blazer]

How you dealt with backing up the unique Firmware data like Chipset integrated NIC MAC Address, Motherboard UUID and Serial Numbers, and so? I had to get my X10SAT Firmware chip reprogrammed a year ago because somehow the Firmware got corrupted and couldn't fix it (It has no IPMI, tried via USB Flash Drive), and just flashing the binary distributed for upgrading left placeholder values. I know that they can be manually re-added but it is a pain.

 

[MasterIT]

How you dealt with backing up the unique Firmware data like Chipset integrated NIC MAC Address, Motherboard UUID and Serial Numbers, and so? I had to get my X10SAT Firmware chip reprogrammed a year ago because somehow the Firmware got corrupted and couldn't fix it (It has no IPMI, tried via USB Flash Drive), and just flashing the binary distributed for upgrading left placeholder values. I know that they can be manually re-added but it is a pain.

that's stored in the chipset of each one of the modules. the bios is only the software that ties it all together.
on the first boot after burning the bios the board rebooted 4 times to identify all the information from the rest of the modules.
i'm able to confirm that the mac/sn/uuid were all intact at the end of the process.

 

[zir_blazer]

that's stored in the chipset of each one of the modules. the bios is only the software that ties it all together.
on the first boot after burning the bios the board rebooted 4 times to identify all the information from the rest of the modules.
i'm able to confirm that the mac/sn/uuid were all intact at the end of the process.

Then it means that IPMI geared Motherboards may behave completely differently, with the BMC holding a backup copy or something that it writes into the Motherboard Firmware image. Typically, unique data from the Motherboard is actually contained in the Firmware image itself, it is NOT anywhere else. You may read about my full experience with the X10SAT (It is rather long) here.
I ended up doing nothing to fix that particular issue, but I learned quite a bit in the process. For one, the MAC Address of the Chipset integrated NIC is stored in the Firmware image, whereas any discrete onboard PCIe NICs may have its own EEPROM thus it is independent, not getting wrecked if you overwrite the Motherboard Firmware image.

 

[MasterIT]

Then it means that IPMI geared Motherboards may behave completely differently, with the BMC holding a backup copy or something that it writes into the Motherboard Firmware image. Typically, unique data from the Motherboard is actually contained in the Firmware image itself, it is NOT anywhere else. You may read about my full experience with the X10SAT (It is rather long) here.
I ended up doing nothing to fix that particular issue, but I learned quite a bit in the process. For one, the MAC Address of the Chipset integrated NIC is stored in the Firmware image, whereas any discrete onboard PCIe NICs may have its own EEPROM thus it is independent, not getting wrecked if you overwrite the Motherboard Firmware image.

that was an interesting read. this board has 4 intel based nics which are on the PCIe bus. i should pull a rom dump of the chip now that everything is working for backup purposes.
i should mention that when logged into the IPMI interface i didn't lose the any of the s/n's or mac id's so it is possible that the bmc had something to do with the recovery as well.

 

[msbxa]

while trying to flash the BIOS firmware through IPMI (bios update) and upload the latest and the previous bios firmware onto IPMI I get this message “ Board ID mismatch “ as soon as it finished uploading the firmware. Any idea?

 

[ari2asem]

offtopic question: how easy to use soldering iron with this tiny chip when you have used soldering iron 2 times (so, almost no experience with soldering) ??

2nd question: is it possible to change soldered bios chip to socketed version if you have tiny socket for these chips ?? i am asking this for easy swap bios chips if necessary in the future ??

 

[msbxa]

At this point I downloaded the latest bios update from supermicros website and opened the file in the programming tool

Did you rename the the latest bios update image into .rom or you use the same image you downloaded without any changes to write to the bios Chip? Because first I couldn’t be able write until I renamed the image to .rom and when I did write to the bios I got a message that says some truncation. I don’t remember the exact word. Is it ok to continue? FYI, I am using CH341a programmer. One more thing can I flash the bios image dump that I uploaded it’s bios from identical motherboard that was lying around to the corrupted one?
one last thing I managed to upload my bios image dump and it’s not empty But I think it’s corrupted.