I know Enterprise enrollment is a bit of a taboo topic. However, I had purchased this item off of Ebay. After realizing it was managed by BMRN Biomartin as one of their Kiosk units, I had reached out to their service desk team. After being handed around to their desktop operations manager in Ireland, I was handed to a Richard Pace of global security. They had advised they don’t want the chromebox back, but also that they said that it’s “Impossible to complete my request unenrolling the device” without further explanation.
I attempted several times to communicate with them until they stopped responding to my emails. It’s been about a year since I started this journey, and 5 months since my last response. So at this point, I am hoping to find an alternative to get this device working. Specifically I don’t care about using it as a chromebox with chrome OS. I would like to install full UEFI firmware and use it as a proxmox box for a little home server for testing.
I was hoping that I might be able to get some guidance or information on how/if this is possible. I would hate to see this little thing make its way to a landfil, as it still has so much potential.
Thank you for your feedback, I followed the steps and with some runaround I was able to successfully install the custom firmware. I appreciate the detailed instructions and response!
I waited so I can provide some feedback on the process for the uninitiated in flashing/unbricking: The bios SPI chip on mine was a 8 pad chip W25Q128JV. Which chip clips won’t work on, so a WSON-8 probe was the way to go.
A little blurb on the differences between these, and to look up the size and form factor to ensure you can get the right probe for the process.
The W25Q128XX chips in particular also have a bug with the flashrom natively provided in Ubuntu. Which prevent it from being erased. Despite successful reads/backups and validated hashes.Showing this error:
sudo flashrom -p ch341a_spi -v coreboot_edk2-duffy-mrchromebox_20250502.rom --ifd -i bios
flashrom v1.2 on Linux 5.15.167.4-microsoft-standard-WSL2 (x86_64)
flashrom is free software, get the source code at https://flashrom.org
Using clock_gettime for delay loops (clk_id: 1, resolution: 1ns).
Found Winbond flash chip “W25Q128.V..M” (16384 kB, SPI) on ch341a_spi.
Reading ich
descriptor… done.
Using region: “bios”.
Verifying flash… FAILED at 0x00c00000! Expected=0xff, Found=0x5f, failed byte count from 0x00300000-0x00ffffff: 0x3ec1de
Using Windows and AsProgrammer, I was able to successfully erase, flash and verify the chip. Probably not noteworthy enough for the wiki, but something to at least document here for the future encase people encounter the same issue with this chip type/Chromebox 4’s
However to note: I did not have to change anything inside of AsProgrammer after it detected my chip type. Just seems something to do with this specific winbond chip type. Just copy over the flash rom from Linux with the VPD and HWID injected into it.
Other then that, it was a great learning experience with some pitfalls along the way. Thank you again!