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FEATURED How to fix your BIOS if there is corrupted ME area

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Woomack

Benching Team Leader
Joined
Jan 2, 2005
Probably most users won't have ME issues on their Intel 7 series boards. It's happening sometimes while you are trying to overclock your cpu or memory. Pushing too hard especially memory is causing ME errors.
There can be also some other causes so it's not a rule that it can happen only while overclocking.

So what is it all about ?
ME = Management Engine , it's part of BIOS/UEFI responsible for adjusting cpu clock, EIST, power saving stages etc.
Most users see corrupted ME BIOS part as:
- issues with overclocking
- locked cpu ratio at some value , like there is no way to change cpu ratio or there is option to change it only up to maximum clock without turbo
- turbo ratios are not working
- board sees Hyper Threading as not supported ( when you use CPU with HT )
- some other issues

I saw some users with similar issues and in most cases all threads about it were ending on RMA what means additional costs and wasted time so here is short way how to solve it.
When I had this issue for the first time then I found thread on HardOCP forums that describes more options but we don't really need much to fix our issue.

So how to do it ?

1. Download FTK software. Latest version is available in original topic ( in russian but it's not hard to find links ;) ) Here is link to DOS 0.9.5 version that I'm using.

2. Create bootable flash drive with DOS. There are many ways to do it. I'm usually using HP USB Stick Formatting Tool. There is also description in hardforum link to other software so I think it won't be so hard.

3. Download your board's BIOS in desired version ( older or newer ) and rename it to bios.bin . So if it's in format .rom or any other then just change it manually to .bin , simple as that.

4. Copy FTK software and bios.bin to the same folder on the flash drive

5. Type reflash and wait till it ends

6. When it finishes, it's recommended to use command poweroff and that's all


In this way you can reflash all BIOS with ME area without need of RMA.
BIOS recovery for some boards even ROG series won't fix it and will flash back only main area of the BIOS/UEFI.

I've checked it on ASUS Maximus V Gene and MSI MPower and it's working without issues on both boards. I can't guarantee it will work on any board but when you have option to make RMA or try this way then I think it's worth to try.

Credits to CodeRush. I just made short version of it.
 
I am having issues with my mvg. It will not boot if I do a restart, but will boot if I shutdown and do cold boot. Sometimes it resets some things in bios like power saving stuff. Do you think the above fix would help with my issues?
 
This is only ME fix but you can try to force flash whole BIOS+ME from USB flash drive. Pick any other version , older or newer to be sure it will overwrite everything. Later you can back to the latest version.
ME is affecting overclocking, turbo ratios etc so it's not directly linked with your issues but I generally know what you mean. I had similar issues with my M5G but not all at once. Like I was only losing OC profiles or I had to restart mobo 2-3 times to make it boot. Then BIOS flash helped but I was losing all profiles and settings.
Setting resets should happen only after failed overclock, not while normal work.

As I said I would use that recovery flash option ( forgot how it's called ) as standard BIOS flash won't overwrite everything.
 
My old Gigabyte X58A-UD3R had symptoms similar to what you are describing. Would this be useful on it?

Symptoms:
If Windows blue screened and rebooted, it would lose all settings and revert to stock in bios (no UEFI). Once in a blue moon, it would boot up saying that it reverted to stock settings for no reason.
On boot up, it would take 10-15 seconds before the very first bios string would even come up on screen, always. Cold or warm boot did not matter.
Very often when booting into Windows, if I got scratchy audio, I had to reboot or soon, it would blue screen. Sometimes had to do that a couple of times till the audio was normal at login. Same with sleep, I couldn't use it because of that scratchy audio/blue screen issue (almost always had to reboot when coming out of sleep because of it).
Overclocking on this board would always fail when getting close to or above 4GHz.
 
Hi,

i have some problems flashing the file via FTK.

I always get error 26:
Error 26: The host CPU does not have read access to the target flash area. To enable read access for this operation you must modify the descriptor settings to give host access to this region.

My Asrock Z77 Extreme4 has a corrupted IEM. I can not use the integrated graphics card and the multiplier is locked to max 37.
 
I saw that new motherboards often have a separate option in BIOS to flash ME. At least I saw it on the last mobos that I was testing. I haven't seen problems with ME recently, so I guess it doesn't happen as often as it used to on older motherboards.
 
I wonder if it's something specific that I said recently or in general ;) I'm aware I'm pretty negative about, well, too many things.
 
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