Hey everyone,
I sincerely hope there is someone around who can help me with this problem, as clicking "contact lenovo support" does not provide any actual contact method with Lenovo support personnel :D
So the story:
I bought one of the desktops that were being offered for sale at my company. These guys came off duty in January, and had warranty and support till March of this year, but they took their sweet time wiping them, so I only received mine now.
When I went to install windows, I went into the bios to set the usb stick boot priority, and found the bios screen was in shambles. It was working, and all text was legible, but it looked like a text file opened with the wrong format in an ancient version of Word or something.
This was somewhat of a concern, but the machine seemed to be working fine, and windows 7 64 bit installed without a hitch (aside from needing a days worth of updates and a ton of lenovo drivers).
So after the first wave of windows updates, I got the service bridge installed, and had Lenovo System Update take care of all drivers and suggested updates. All succeeded, except for the BIOS flashing! The flashing window came up, started doing it's thing, then quit before I could read any errors. I believe the error was Child Process error 16. No matter what I did, it did not work.
At that point it was late in the PM, so I just gave up and let windows do all the remaining updates instead of messing more with it.
Day 2, Windows fully updated, I gave it another go. I got a message that flashing was going to start, then the window went blank with a flashing cursor, until windows started to shut down. I've flashed Lenovo machiens earlier, so I knew it would do the actual flashing after reboot, then reboot again, so no big deal right? Except, after reboot, after the brief flash of the NIC bios, all I got was the flashing cursor!
Now I'm no idiot, I know bios flashing can take a few minutes, and had no idea what was actually going on in the background, so I waited somewhat over half an hour before hard-reseting the machine, as it was non-responsive.
To my relief it booted right up. Apparently the bios update happened too, as I could enter the BIOS, and actually had the layout fixed, I could properly see what was what. Fixed right? Well... almost... When I press save and exit, the confirmation window has a graphical glitch (no is permanently black, and the right edge of the window has one segment out of place). So I went to look through the settings, and everything else seems to be in order... though when I change language to french, I have missing characters and questionmarks instead of letters all over the place, and the third language option is just a questionmark and half a bracket, when selected pretty much everything becomes garbled. But it still seems to be working fine (typing from the affected machine as we speak).
So I am thinking the flash process had something gone wonky, or the actual flash rom (the hardware itself) has a fault or a soldering error.
I tried to re-flash again. Of course the Lenovo updater thinks the update was successful, and does not try the flashing process again. Using the update tool on the support site now, using CMD as Admin:
Reading flash ........ done
Secure Flash enabled, recalculate ROM size with signature... Enable.
- FFS checksums ....... ok
Loading capsule to secure memory buffer ... done
18 - Error: Secure Flash Rom Verify fail
Child process failed. Reutrn code: 24
I get the same result if I try from a bootable pendrive.
Does this intend to say that the ROM I am trying to load does not pass some form of security checksum, or that loading it into physical memory and reading it back before flashing returns a different checksum (IE hardware error?)?
The BIOS option to flash older versions is enabled!
Windows info returns bios version as: LENOVO 9SKT9AAUS, which is the new version the Lenovo updater tried to flash.
Is there a valid workaround for this, or is this likely a hardware problem? (In which case I will return the PC and get my money back).
Thanks for any help in advance!