Vortex4 bios update (with video), gone wrong or not

[luckyluca]

[SORTED] Vortex4 bios update question

I'm the owner of a p170sm laptop from pcspecialist, they recently sent me a usb key containing a bios update for my laptop.
I created a usb boot key with rufus and copied the files PCS sent me.

Basically during the update process I got warning and errors (error 25). I decided to film the update process and post it on youtube so to make it easier to see what's going on:

Here's what I did:
the first time I booted I run flashEC.bat and it run rather quickly. That seemed to work however it only updated one of the two versions which make up the bios.

The second time I run flashme.bat instead and that is what the video shows.

Both version numbers in the bios are now updated making me thing that the update went through properly.
However I have a bad feeling about the warnings and errors, what do you reckon?

I'm including the content of flashme.bat and ecflash.bat

flashme.bat:

fpt -f P17SM6M.303 -l 0x200000 /y
Call flash.bat
fpt /closemnf /y
Afudos.exe /s /shutdown

ecflash.bat

@set EC_FILE.bin=eP17SM.301

:AssignFile

if "%1" == "" goto DefaultFile
if "%2" == "" goto DefaultParameter

ELASH11.EXE %1 %2 %3 %4 %5 %6 %7
goto End

:DefaultParameter

ELASH11.EXE %1 /ad /h3
goto End

:DefaultFile
ELASH11.EXE %EC_FILE.bin% /ad /h3

:End

 

[keynes]

Just curious why you decided to update the bios.

 

[mantadog]

If you can boot your system into windows then you should probably just leave it alone now. Last week some poor guy updated his bios to solve a noisy fan by reducing the speed as the bearings were shot (he had one on order but decided to put in a 'quick fix') he bricked he laptop. If yours appears to be working then leave it at that.

I hope you had something that genuinely required a BIOS update as updating it is one of the few way to turn your laptop into a brick if it goes wrong.

 

[luckyluca]

Here's an update.
What was missing was I needed to disable the intel thief technology option in the bios, plug the psu and run meset.exe first. Unfortunately there were no readme.txt in the usbkey, I managed to figure this out after some digging online.
The reason why I needed a new bios it is because I was trying to solve a few usb2-usb3 mouse issues I've been facing and bios changelogs seemed promising on this matter, considering I had a very old bios installed.

The laptop is functioning well, the errors are gone now, the warnings during the updating procedure however remained.
They are about skipping parts of P17SM6M.303 because its size is bigger than the space allocated (probably due to the line fpt -f P17SM6M.303 -l 0x200000 /y contained in the file flashme.bat which is forcing the rom into a smaller space, not sure why it was added by PCS). This can be seen as the yellow text from my old video, now the red error text is gone luckily.

 

[luckyluca]

This is now sorted, thank you.
Basically the usbkey received lacked a readme and one of the .bat files wasn't setup correctly apparently (hence ME firwmare size warnings ).
Running the procedure again (in the correct order) solved the issue and flashed the bios/ec correctly. I ended up running the ME firmware at a later stage separately using the windows' intel updater.
The system is as smooth as ever, it's a great and fast machine, highly recommended!