Hello, someone has gifted me a Dell Chromebook 3100 a couple months back, and i’ve been working on it here and there, trying to turn it into a linux laptop. Though, I have been struggling with fully disabling WP on it. I know I am suppost to disconnect the battery from the mainboard, which I have done with no success. I have also attempted to run flashrom --wp-disable in the shell, but was given this error. I am stumped, do I have to go out and buy a suzyqable, or is my not very tech savvy brain just doing something wrong?
running things you don’t need to and won’t work produce the expected results
what does that mean? You disconnected the battery cable at the mainboard connection and then what?
after disconnecting i gave it a few minutes before booting it with my charger; i pretty much followed your directions on your website. and i know doing such things isnt always going to give me my expected result but it never hurts to try…right? i have no prior experience, and have taken this as a teeny passion project to play around with and whatnot. ive never done anything like this before.
so, am i doing something wrong?
So have you disconnected the battery from the motherboard (and therefore the rest of the computer)?
yes. then i give it a few minutes before i boot it back up, with the charger plgged into it, of course.
What are you trying to do? If you want to run MrChromebox’s script, then there’s no need to run any software WP commands like flashrom.
If you disconnected the battery, you can confirm that hardware WP is disabled with the command crossystem | grep wpsw and it should return 0 (his script will also confirm this btw). If it does, then go ahead and run the script.
its a 1. and yes, im trying to run his script. i guess i may have to go out and get a suzyqable, or else im disconnecting the battery wrong. not sure how i could disconnect it wrongly though.
When I disabled write protect I followed this YouTube video by ITMOfficial and it worked perfectly great for me. Trying following his steps.
For me (on a different CB), it was open the case, disconnect the battery, then with the battery still disconnected, plug in power and boot the computer. I think it needs to boot without the battery for it to turn off write protection.
100% this
Oh yes did you plug the battery back in? Because that would def undo what unplugging the battery does.
thats what ive been exactly doing step by step, but it still seems to be enabled?
i got the right chromebook and model name, im not mistaking it for another chromebook. on chromeboxes website it says i can disable it by unplugging the battery, im really confused. i dont believe my chromebooks new enough to where i can only disable the wp via a suzyqable, but i can be wrong of course, the thing was made in 2019. could it be because the os is damaged? i cant restore it, ive tried, just doesnt work? ive been using e-halcyon to get onto chrome and whatnot.
and also, i apologize for being vauge and/or throwing in random info thats not really needed or relates to this issue
FWMP will prevent you from disabling WP.
oh! that makes a lot of sense haha