Help Needed – Bricked Chromebook After Flashing UEFI ROM

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1

Hi everyone,

Nice to e-meet you all! I’m new here and hoping to get some advice. I have a Lenovo IdeaPad Flex 5i, and earlier today I tried flashing the UEFI full ROM using a SuzyQable, following the tutorial on MrChromebox. Unfortunately, I managed to brick my Chromebook in the process.

As far as I can recall, everything went according to the tutorial except for a couple of points:

  1. When I first ran the Firmware Utility Script, it mentioned a software write-protect (WP). I followed the script’s instructions to disable it and then restarted the laptop.
  2. I used a flash drive formatted as exFAT to back up the stock firmware. Later, when I tried to restore it, I found that the backup file wasn’t actually saved on the flash drive.

After the script reported a successful flash, I selected R to reboot, but the screen stayed black indefinitely. After waiting for quite a while, I concluded that my Chromebook was bricked.

Next, I followed the MrChromebox unbricking guide. Using the SuzyQable and another laptop running Linux Mint, I was able to read the corrupted ROM (“badrom”). However, when I tried to load the HWID with gbb_utility, it gave the error:

“No GBB found in bad flash.rom.”

Now I’m unsure how to proceed. My questions are:

  1. Does this mean my VPD is corrupted, and should I avoid injecting the VPD extracted from the current on-board ROM?

  2. If flashing a shellball ROM is my only option, is there a way to replace the MAC address—perhaps using the one I can recover from my router logs?

Any help or advice would be greatly appreciated. Thanks in advance!

2

I found a couple of HWIDs for the same model through a Google search. Then I used another laptop and the SuzyQable to flash the UEFI ROM again. Unfortunately, I still got the same black screen. After that, I tried flashing the shellball ROM for TAEKO, and the Chromebook finally came back to life—it’s now working normally. So I’m wondering if the latest UEFI ROM for TAEKO (or for this laptop model) might be broken?