Good evening, dear friends! Greetings from Brazil.
I have a Lenovo 100e Gen 3 Vilboz Chromebook, which I was given by my school for getting good grades. This happened during the pandemic, when schools here in Brazil were giving away Chromebooks to help students with their studies.
Because I had excellent grades, they allowed me to keep the device, something I didn’t pay much attention to at the time, after all, I didn’t use social media or anything like that very much.
Well, I was tidying up my room and found the Chromebook in good condition (I confess I had no idea where I had put it), but it is completely blocked from making any kind of modification, I can only use it for browsing.
I tried to access developer mode and without success! When I try, the Chromebook doesn’t let me do this procedure and restarts to normal mode.
I came to the conclusion that in order to use it, I will have to change the BIOS firmware externally through a BIOS rewriter and install another system.
My question is: If I perform this procedure and later try to return to Chrome OS, will I be asked again for my school email address, which is under the domain?
Are the school domain settings stored in the BIOS EPROM or in the EMMC of the system’s internal memory?
I have already tried to contact my old school, but without success.
I believe that it is based on the devices serial number or something like that. Restoring the devices original firmware will cause it to re-enroll, however if you succeed in writing custom firmware you can use the brunch framework to run Chrome OS, as well as standard Linux distributions.
Thanks for the answer friend! I confess that I am confused, since in other forums and youtube channels, some say that the link is through hwid (connected to the internet the school domain will return) and others say that, performing the BIOS rewrite and return to stock firmware, the domain will disappear.
I don’t have the knowledge and confidence to perform the BIOS rewrite and I will pay a technician to perform the procedure, however, I wanted to make sure I wouldn’t “brick” the chromebook.
The alternative would be to actually use a ChromeOS-derived distro such as Bruch and FydeOS.
I wouldn’t recommend paying a technician since you wouldn’t know what they have done. My recommendation would be to try unenroll exploits first.
(because if you don’t the cr50 would still think its in normal mode and enrolled and I’m not sure how that would play with custom firmware, plus the technician would have to know to not just flash the rom because regions of the stock firmware have to be extracted first). I think that the risks associated with bricking would be mostly from esd or wiring the programmer incorrectly (eg using 5v programmer with 3v chip). Because you should always make a backup (do it multiple times and make sure files are identical with diff). That way, worst case scenario you can restore backup if you flash a bad firmware.