Cannot flash Full ROM on top of a Legacy ROM

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1

Hello,

I’m a happy Samsung Chromebox 3 (stumpy) owner, it survived 3 home moves and is serving me h24 since about 10 years. I decided to give it an upgrade to a UEFI Full ROM but I’m experiencing some difficulties in doing so.

The device is currently running a legacy SeaBIOS firmware that the Firmware Tool displays as “MrChromebox (11/11/2016)”: @MrChromebox probably won’t remember it, but we were chatting on Google Chat on those days and experimenting with auto-power-on on AC loss, so this was a firmware from those test builds. (unfortunately auto-power-on did not work, by the way, but that’s another story :stuck_out_tongue: ).

I’m currently running an Ubuntu 22.04 on it, I can’t go back to stock firmware since I replaced the SSD with a bigger one and I remember the stock firmware didn’t like this. So, I’m running the Firmware Tool from Ubuntu itself.

However, when I try to “Install/update Full UEFI (Full ROM) Firmware” (option 1), it fails with this error:

Error running cmd: /tmp/flashrom -p internal:boardmismatch=force --ifd -i bios -N -w coreboot_edk2-stumpy-mrchromebox_20240914.rom >/dev/null 2>&1 -o /tmp/flashrom.log

Here is the full content of /tmp/flashrom.log: flashrom MrChromebox-1.4.0-devel_2024.04.18 (git:v1.2-1418-ge5ed0c6340) on Linux - Pastebin.com

Can I please get some help? :slight_smile:

Thank you!

2

what happens if you use the distro’s built-in flashrom?

sudo flashrom -p internal --ifd -i bios -N -w /tmp/coreboot_edk2-stumpy-mrchromebox_20240914.rom -o /tmp/flashrom.log

you might need to add -c "chipname" if it detects multiple chips. In that case, try with each option (assuming the first doesn’t work)

3

Seems like this was the way to go, thank you!

On first run it asked me to choose between “W25Q64BV/W25Q64CV/W25Q64FV” and “W25Q64JV-.Q”. I used the first one as “-c” argument and it flashed correctly.

I’ll now verify if everything works.

It it’ useful:

1 Like
4

have the full log from that (/tmp/flashrom.log)?

5

Uh sorry, I already rebooted and I just finished converting my setup to UEFI. I didn’t think of taking the log before rebooting, and it’s gone now.

I tried running it again, but it will tell me that the content is identical: Hastebin

Interesting fact. I tried running it through your script again and it gave no error: Hastebin . Maybe it’s because the content is still identical.

If there is something I can do to make it force flash again, I’ll send the logs.

Thanks again!

6

Hello again,

I received a notification that two posts into the thread have been hidden because flagged as Spam.

I suspect it’s due to the links to the log files, but I just used Pastebin like everyone does, to avoid making a wall of text into the post itself.

I think that the solution given here by @MrCrhomebox is really precious, and I don’t want it to be hidden! Can I have some feedback by the community, instead of just spam flags (?), on how I’m supposed to post logs?

Thank you

7

it’s fine, I approved the posts. The spam detection system is just sensitive to new users posting multiple links in a single post it seems.

I’ll be updating the script once I figure out why it failed for you but not for me. I was using Pop_OS! 22.04

8

Cool, thank you! If I can be of any help with testing it just let me know! Meanwhile I can confirm that the flash succeeded and the system works like a charm :partying_face: