BIOS corruption?

[pgoelz]

Something possibly odd happened to me and I'm wondering what the collective wisdom here says about it.

I have a spare X61s running Middleton BIOS with swapped CTL and FN buttons that I have been using for Windows 10 and also to play around with a Hackintosh installation. While playing around with a Hackintosh installation of Leopard, I ran into the issue where activating sleep within Leopard corrupts the BIOS settings. I thought I was back to normal after applying default BIOS settings and changing a couple parameters. But maybe not.....

Yesterday, W10 failed to shut down. Every time I attempted to shut it down, it would shut down and turn off.... and then in a couple seconds would turn on again and boot. I also noticed that the fan seemed to be running slower than usual. Both of these could be the flakey W10 OS. Or not.....

Applying default BIOS settings did not change either behavior so I decided to re-flash the BIOS. Booting from my Middleton CD, the flash appeared to initialize and the screen said "Beginning flash". But there was no indication of any progress and a minute or two later there was a LONG beep and the screen now showed "Beginning flash = done" and it rebooted. Does that mean the flash completed?

Since I was unsure if the flash actually completed, I dug out my original 2.21 BIOS CD and booted from that. That flash completed and the whitelist was back in effect so I am sure the flash succeeded.

W10 now seems to shut down correctly, but the fan still seems to want to run slower than usual under some circumstances so I am left wondering.... what happened? Can a Hackintosh OS actually corrupt BIOS?

In any event I'm done trying to play with Hackintosh. Just doesn't work well enough. And I THINK that if the BIOS was corrupted it is now fixed. But the CTL and FN buttons are still swapped since I have not yet remembered how to un swap them. Is there something in the embedded controller (that has yet to be reflashed to unswap the buttons) that could have something to do with the fan or the shutdown behavior?

Paul

[dr_st]

Probabilistically speaking, BIOS corruption will result in your computer being totally bricked (either because the BIOS fails its own checksum or because it turned into a mess). Not in manifestation of some bizarre minor effects.

So, no, I don't think you've experienced BIOS corruption.

[precip9]

The BIOS checksums itself during boot.

This board has occasional posts about problems relating to the power-state circuitry. There is plenty of random logic, and a few analog sensors, that could be responsible for your problem.

But as always, suspect software first, and rule it out with authoritative measures, like a clean install.

[RealBlackStuff]

The original Middleton BIOS came with two options, one "standard", and one with Ctrl/Fn swap.
You need to reload the "standard" Middleton version to UNdo the Ctrl/Fn swap.
And after that reinstall standard Lenovo BIOS, but ONLY if you do not want those Middleton goodies, like SATA II speed, Slic etc.

[pgoelz]

I guess I was just being paranoid. My Hackintosh installation DID corrupt the BIOS settings so when things got weird with Windows, I suspected it had done worse than corrupt the settings.

The trouble with a clean install is that we're talking about Windows 10 Technical Preview here. Many builds down the road, MS still hasn't ironed out some of the most basic bugs and it is also very difficult to tell the difference between what is broken vs. what is by design. I did swap the hard drive into my other X61s to see if the problem moved with it but that fun little project ended with a boot loop, a trashed user profile and a clean reinstall. No idea why, although the two machines are SLIGHTLY different. The Win10 machine has a 1.6GHz CPU and 2GB RAM and my regular Win7 machine has a 1.8GHz CPU and 4GB RAM. No reason it shouldn't have booted, though. Who knows..... it WAS Windows 10 after all........

The fan operation seems to have reverted back to normal.

Paul

[pgoelz]

The original Middleton BIOS came with two options, one "standard", and one with Ctrl/Fn swap.
You need to reload the "standard" Middleton version to UNdo the Ctrl/Fn swap.
And after that reinstall standard Lenovo BIOS, but ONLY if you do not want those Middleton goodies, like SATA II speed, Slic etc.

Yes, I have both Middleton versions and did try reloading the standard Middleton. The buttons did not un-swap. After some reading, I now remember that is because the BIOS flash routine does not flash the embedded controller if its version has not changed. I have to read up on it more and re-check my BIOS CDs.... I think there is a special one to un-swap the buttons and I know I had it at one point.

Since the buttons did not un-swap when I was trying to reflash the BIOS, I had no way of knowing for sure that the BIOS did indeed get flashed so I flashed the standard Lenovo 2.21 BIOS to be sure. This particular machine used to use an SSD but is currently using a hard drive and the WiFi card is on the whitelist so no current need for Middleton.

Paul