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Lenovo X1 Yoga Gen1 (20FR) BIOS corrupt question

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    Lenovo X1 Yoga Gen1 (20FR) BIOS corrupt question

    Hi all,

    I have a Thinkpad X1 yoga (1st gen 20FR). I bought the device recently on an auction. All was working fine but I noticed that there was a supervisor password on the BIOS.

    After reading online (unfortunately not too well), I read that I could short the SCL and SDA pin while the laptop was booting, in order to remove that password. I tried this a few times without success. The last attempt, I must've done something wrong (my guess is that I shorted pin 6 and 7 or maybe even 8).

    Now my device is in the state where it doesn't show anything on the screen, it starts, the fan starts spinning but nothing more than that.
    No other components are damages (afaik) but it looks like the BIOS is corrupt.

    What would be my options in this situation?
    - Can I buy a new BIOS chip, pre-flashed for my model (20FR)? From what I read this will not work as the device was previously password protected (something with a checksum that won't match). I tried to contact a few sellers on eBay but none of them seems to give a clear reply.
    If this gets my device back to a working one, even with the supervisor password still present, that would be fine for me.

    - Can I unsolder the BIOS chip and apply the steps to unlock the BIOS (using the autopatcher). In this case I worry that I won't be able to use the current BIOS chip contents. Is that something I can check and fix?

    - Any other options I'm forgetting about?

    Soldering is not a problem and I've done PIC programming long time ago so I'd probably figure that out as well. (I was thinking about buying a programmer for some time anyway).

    Thanks a lot for your time on this.

    #2
    Re: Lenovo X1 Yoga Gen1 (20FR) BIOS corrupt question

    If you want to learn or at least fix your laptop, especially with bios. Then you must have a flash tool. So, you can try some methode from here for fixing bios
    sorry for my bad english

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      #3
      Re: Lenovo X1 Yoga Gen1 (20FR) BIOS corrupt question

      Received the CH341A in the meanwhile and was able to take a backup
      (3 attempts which have the same checksum).

      Is there anyone who could have a look what might be wrong with the contents?

      Thanks!
      Attached Files

      Comment


        #4
        Re: Lenovo X1 Yoga Gen1 (20FR) BIOS corrupt question

        Managed to get this fixed and tying this message from the X1 Yoga

        Sharing the steps I went through in case this can help someone

        Tried the following things:
        - Re-flashed he original backup, hoping this could fix something -> No change
        - Flashed a BIOS dump which was patched with auto-patcher for the same model -> Managed to get something to display on the screen
        - After a few attempts, I managed to get into the BIOS and to go through the steps to reset the supervisor password!
        - Tried to reflash the original backup -> Same issue, blank screen, spinning fan
        - Tried to flash the BIOS dump that was the base for the patched file I used with success above -> Managed to go to the BIOS and reset to defaults but the BIOS setup was hanging on exit
        - Eventually managed to boot into Windows. Booting took a long time before I got something on the display and BIOS setup was still hanging on exit
        - Flashed a BIOS update from Windows
        - At this point all seems to more or less function normal

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