Asus VivoBook S14 Password

[misterdray]

I am finally reaching out for some help after I attempted different routes. I have an Asus VivoBook S14 with a locked down BIOS. I have been trying to remove the password to enable USB booting. I can access the BIOS via USER settings (minimal) and login to Windows. The board has a GigaDevice 25B127DSIG which can be read and write using Gigadevice GD25Q128 in the programmers. There are no other chips on the board.

BTW I have the chip off the board currently at the moment. I would like to avoid putting it back on the board until the issue is resolved as the clips for flashing SUCK and I have already used the hot air iron to remove the chip twice now.

I have been using CH341AUSB Programmer and have tried ASProgrammer. Flashrom can be available also if I need it but I have no issues with the current programmers.

This is what I have tried so far:

1. Install Clover Bootloader on main drive to see if I could possibly reset NVRAM or boot via USB. Turns out I cannot! I may be able to partition drive and install macOS or a Linux distro on the drive and boot via Clover(worth a shot).

2. I have edited BIOS vis AMIBCPS changing the Access/Use to USER under the Main and Security sections. This did not work, although when I enabled a few things i could see them listed but could not access do to only having USER level BIOS access.

3. Flash just the downloaded BIOS (not update) from the website for this machine which made the laptop a no start condition. I flash back to original BIOS starts up just fine.

4. Attempted to extract the ME region and use ME Analyzer to verify ME version but fail to find a clean ME region download online. and ME Analyzer errors out with an unknown version.

Upon further investigation it looks like the downloaded firmware form the website contains the entire BIOS with everything. Correct me if I am wrong, but can I not just delete the first 2KB as someone explained in another post then flash the chip? I was in the understanding regarding the Serial Number, Windows Key, and MAC address in the DMI table. But honestly I am not too worried about that anyways as I will be swapping out the wireless card and eventually not be running Windows on the machine if I can get past the BIOS password issue.

I have attached some screenshots and the original BIOS backup aswell as the website download. I did verify the versions etc. to be identical. If anyone could help that would be great!

Descriptor Region Info:

Flash descriptor version: 1.0
Full size: 1000h (4096)
ME region offset: 1000h
BIOS region offset: 700000h
Region access settings:
BIOS: 00Fh 00Ah ME: 00Dh 004h
GbE: 009h 008h EC: 101h 100h
BIOS access table:
Read Write
Desc Yes No
BIOS Yes Yes
ME Yes No
GbE Yes Yes
PDR No No
EC No No
Flash chips in VSCC table:
C84018h
C22018h

[rioreno]

Re: Asus VivoBook S14 Password

try..

[misterdray]

Re: Asus VivoBook S14 Password

I will and I will let you know. Thank you

[misterdray]

Re: Asus VivoBook S14 Password

try..

Ok so I tried in CH341A Programmer v1.29 & v1.18
and ASProgrammer 1.41 and ASProgrammer v2.1.0.13

All come back that the contents are within disagreement after erase, blank check, write, read then verify. when I flash original backup back, I receive no error.
I try again now with erase, blank check, write on ASProgrammer v2.1.0.13
Then i open CH341A Programmer v1.18 read, open Clear bin and verify, I get success. I do this one more time, I get success. solder bac to board and you are AWESOME!

I do admit I compared both bins in a hex editor to see what was changed..
THANK YOU

[bukiluki]

Re: Asus VivoBook S14 Password

try..

dear friend
can you tell me the resisstors values under the bios. i lost mine during putting the clamp adapter to read the bios.