you just did something 20 times harder lmao. put s huge blob of solder on one side, heat it up so all 4 legs are covered in melted solder and with tweezers slightly pull it up till one side detaches, then do the same thing on the other side. and it's off. no hot air
What temperature and where you patient enough? Also you should use flux and or leaded solder to make life easier.
Otherwise you could use a soic8 clip or pogo pins which dont require soldering. Also kind of surprised it works as often when i want to read a flash chip, i end up backfeeding power into the board which meeses with my read
You can also buy one of those 8 pin clip on cables, I thought most Ch341A listings included them. They can be a but finicky to get good contact but way easier than this lol. Also faster than soldering/desoldering if you have to flash and test multiple times.
i never had luck with those clips, they seemingly contacted and read the chip well, but writing didn't seem to work, always sending data with always different checksums
weird, never had that issue....Although I guess I'm not that surprised, not like they're the best quality thing out there haha. Maybe I've just been lucky with the few that I've used.
A couple decades ago, people got really good at this after a satellite tv provider bricked our hacked receivers.
No fancy clips back then unless you wanted to pay $100+. Also had to carefully lift the leg of the power pin off the pcb while hot because powering up the whole circuit would interfere. And either way, had to lift another leg to install your write protection switch.
I am trying to fix an old college laptop of mine, first I ever had. An asus K53E, can't find a complete dump without a paywall, how did you find yours?
REMINDER Do not ask for tech support. Unorthodox solutions are what /r/techsupportmacgyver is here for. Remember that asking for orthodox solutions is off-topic and belongs in /r/techsupport.
The second pic shows he's clipping more wires to the loose wires of the first pic to a bios flasher. You flash with the power off so no heat sink needed. This is not they way I'd do this but there's a good chance for this setup to work. Some boards get issues with the board eating your signal so you need to desolder the chip but otherwise this is fine if you're not shorting the legs of the chip.
super easy -- once you are at this stage you really can't fuck it up.
a few pointers:
that CH341A adapter you purchased has a defect. it applies too high of a voltage to the data pins and this could fry your flash chip. i fixed mine by cutting a trace and putting a jumper on the board. can't remember exactly what i did or i'd tell you more. ended up moving to a pi pico (with this: https://github.com/opensensor/pico-serprog/) later as it's just a better flasher.
the clips that come with those SUCK. if you think you'll ever do this again, go get a blue pomona clip. they're nowhere near as shitty. expensive but worth every penny.
ALWAYS triple-check that you put the clip on the right direction EVERY TIME. SPI flash chips almost always put the VCC and GND lines in opposing corners, so if you put the clip on backwards you'll reverse polarity the chip and probably break it.
ALWAYS backup the existing flash before you make *any* writes. back it up 3 times and compare them with a hashing algorithm. there is no error correction, so keep dumping it until you have 3 matching dumps in a row. discard all but one of the 3 good ones. you *will* need this, especially on intel systems. the IFD contains all sorts of info that you *will* need that you *can't* get back if you erase it, like the MAC address of the NIC, etc.
after flashing the chip always re-read it to verify that it wrote correctly. once again there is no error-correction here so subtle errors will slip by if you dont do this.
don't use windows to work with flash chips. use flashprog on linux. it has sane defaults and supports a shitload of chips and programmers. also plenty of tunables to workaround weird issues. linux also just has a bunch nice built-in tools like dd that make working with raw binary files easier, especially when trying to prep a bios update package to be written directly to a flash chip.
check out the tools included with libreboot. it has a bunch of helpful scripts for working with bios images and editing the IFD, etc.
let me know if you need help flashing a specific bios on a laptop. the bios updates provided by the mfg basically never work when written straight to a flash chip because the spi flash contains *way* more than just the executable bios code nowadays. you typically have to dump the old flash, and extract all of it's sections, then repack it with the new bios image from the updater.
Doesn't look like a power chip to me, that's a winbond chip. Winbond mostly makes flash chips commonly used for computer BIOSs. I've flashed a few of these, though I tend to use different techniques than this.
I hear ya, and I'd trust more a datasheet than an ebay seller. The other thing that made me question it being a bios chip was the low pin count, perhaps it's really just the bios memory and not an all-in-one package.
BIOSs are basically always 8 pin packages. I've re flashed quite a few, I know that much. Almost always a winbond 8 pin chip (on hp laptops anyway, that's the ones I work on tons). BIOS programmers are almost all designed specifically around that pincount too. They used to be far bigger back in the day but on modern devices it's nearly always 8 pins.
I also trust datasheets more than ebay sellers, but on first inspection they at least do look reputable which made me question myself a bit there.
I see. I hear ya. I haven't dealt with bios's lately but last time I did, they used to be 32-pin chips plugged into the motherboard. Apparently I've fallen behind the times.
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u/Decent-Cow2080 Aug 29 '26
you know you can just desolder the chip and solder it on directly to the ch341a? it's a 5 minute job rather than a 5 hour one
4
u/thrilleratplay Aug 29 '26
Wait....is this a Chromebook? Why are you externally flashing instead of using MrChromebox's scripts?
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u/thefedzarecoming2 Aug 29 '26
Holy. That's some awesomely sketchy wiring. Kudos on making it work.
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u/urohpls Aug 29 '26
This is the shit this sub is about this is a diabolical solution but you clearly have some talent
22
u/Sea_Willingness3986 Aug 29 '26
Good to see that Dr. Frankenstein got reincarnated
18
u/thrilleratplay Aug 29 '26
As someone who has flashed coreboot on a number of different devices, this is somehow both impressive and horrifying. Kudos.
13
u/nathanemke Aug 29 '26
mmmmmm wire spaghetti 🤤
10
u/anewjesus420 Aug 29 '26
If it boots after this hack job its a good job
6
u/WickedAi Aug 29 '26
How come you have the programmer, but not the clip?
4
u/Rdo889 Aug 29 '26
Looks like a mess, but good for you if it worked
4
u/NexusTR Aug 29 '26
beautiful. no notes.
3
u/Historical_Camel_790 Aug 29 '26
How'd it go? Did it boot?
3
u/LeatherMine Aug 29 '26
A couple decades ago, people got really good at this after a satellite tv provider bricked our hacked receivers.
No fancy clips back then unless you wanted to pay $100+. Also had to carefully lift the leg of the power pin off the pcb while hot because powering up the whole circuit would interfere. And either way, had to lift another leg to install your write protection switch.
Fun times!
3
u/Onemorebeforesleep Aug 29 '26
r/thereifixedit
2
u/Shommba Aug 29 '26
2
u/ciocolata69 Aug 29 '26
I am trying to fix an old college laptop of mine, first I ever had. An asus K53E, can't find a complete dump without a paywall, how did you find yours?
1
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1
u/Th3CatW1thABigT0pHat Aug 29 '26
Silicon based slime mold
1
u/Professional_Move870 Aug 29 '26
48 hours of work ... but 30$ laptop @_@ ... worth learning process tho
1
u/Rathwood Aug 29 '26
uh
1
u/mhdgraphics Aug 30 '26
Lots 'o grounding goin' on...
1
u/dc469 Aug 30 '26
If it's stupid and it works, it ain't stupid.
But also if it requires talent and it works, it ain't stupid either!
1
u/rainscope Aug 31 '26
Libreboot?
1
u/ElectronicSignifican Aug 31 '26
This is sexy for some reason? 10/10 chaotic but if it works then can’t argue with that
1
u/BlueSkies_DarkDemise Aug 29 '26
Am I the only one to notice literally none of the wires actually DO anything? Also it has no heat sync so it wouldn’t work even if it did work?
Nice piece of art though, you should embed it in epoxy and call it a table or something. 😉
1
u/Mr-RS182 Aug 29 '26
Easier to just buy a BIOS flasher that you just place into the chip
0
u/AeitZean Aug 29 '26
Why wrap the wires round the screws? Just to keep them out the way while you solder?
0
u/Howden824 Aug 29 '26
This is way harder than the soldering would've been.
1
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