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T400 (dGPU variant) is bricked

T400/T410/T420 and T500/T510/T520 Series
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agregate
Posts: 5
Joined: Sat Oct 24, 2020 8:22 am
Location: Paris, France

T400 (dGPU variant) is bricked

#1 Post by agregate » Sun Dec 19, 2021 4:38 pm

Hello everybody.
I am at my wits end with my poor T400 so if anybody has any advice I will be very thankful.

I tried to coreboot my T400 because me from four months ago thought that would be a great idea until I flashed it, at which point it didn't work and I had to revert to the stock BIOS. But there lies the problem. I backed up my original BIOS and did everything by the book: copy it many times, check the checksums to ensure I haven't read crap, etc. and yet for some reason that BIOS still will not let the computer boot.

The main issue I have with coreboot is that my Radeon VGABIOS rom is not being loaded correctly, and I have extracted it using phnxsplit, Phoenix BIOS Editor and some other Python script I found and as far as I can tell it is definitely the right (not corrupt) rom. Now I can use coreboot perfectly fine without it but then I have a dead dGPU which is kind of the reason why I own this Thinkpad.

Does anybody per chance have a BIOS dump of a Thinkpad T400 (2768WRA) model that I can try to flash? Or if failing that, a VGABIOS dump for the 'AMD ATI Mobility Radeon HD 3450/3470' or a configuration file for a successful Hybrid graphics build for coreboot for this same model? I'm honestly not sure what to do.

modmaster
Posts: 24
Joined: Fri Jul 16, 2021 6:56 pm
Location: Kenner, LA

Re: T400 (dGPU variant) is bricked

#2 Post by modmaster » Tue Jan 18, 2022 12:00 am

Then you are pretty much screwed on this, native video initialization depends on these blobs, and unless you can extract them correctly from another identical thinkpad(very unlikely) the dedicated graphics will fail (full fail on Windows with BSODs and stuff and weird big and ugly glitches in Linux) this is a pretty big (and sad) bummer.

I heard of a guy in Lithuania that knew how to recover this kind of problem, but has long gone who knows where...

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