Unable to update S/N after board replacement

[lanovo]

A new systemboard was fitted to a T470. I want to update the serial number to the old one as it is currently saying INVALID and makes loud beep during boot.

I've tried running various Lenovo tools to do this. For example the hardware maintenance diskette. There is also a EFI program that runs directly from a USB EFI partition called the Lenovo Thinkpad Maintenance Utility. I've got this program to load and run but when I put in the values for the S/N in the format:

Code: Select all

1SMMMMTTTTCCSSSSSSSS

where Machine Type, Country Code, Serial number etc, I get this error message:

Code: Select all

TpReadEEPROMBlock write access to block#84 is denied status=0xf, rc0*

The program is not writing to the chip or it's trying to write to an incorrect address on the chip. I have even tried the latest ThinkPad utility n1ctm07w.zip from August 2020.

[lanovo]

Looked hard, high and low to find the cause of this issue. The EFI stub simply on its own doesn't seem to work. Had to boot a copy of Windows to create a USB FDD and then run the EFI stub off that FDD for the program to update the S/N.

A patchwork of programs strewn right across Windows, Linux, DOS and EFI to get this shoddy job done. Not impressed. Highly inconsistent.

Sources

http://www.os2site.com/sw/hardware/ibm/ ... -HWMD.html

http://www.os2site.com/sw/hardware/ibm/ ... index.html

https://download.lenovo.com/pccbbs/mobiles/n1ctm07w.zip

[RealBlackStuff]

Maybe you used an old HMD version?
This is the latest: https://download.lenovo.com/ibmdl/pub/p ... tm38us.exe
It includes a USB option.
When asked to fill in the Type-S/N, use option C0 (not 20).