The chip in question is located directly underneath the laptop’s keyboard and accessible by moving a small plastic flap out of the way (held in place with electrical tape in the above photo). The target for this fix is a small flash memory chip on the laptop’s mainboard that contains the instructions which make up the computer’s BIOS. The solution was to reflash the BIOS chip with a replacement BIOS I found online, using an open source program called ‘flashrom’ and an Arduino acting as an SPI flash programmer. And since it was working perfectly fine up until it er, wasn’t… it seemed like a waste to just throw it out without trying my best to fix it. I’ve had this little Lenovo S205 netbook for a few years and although it’s gotten slower it’s always served me well. I tried everything I knew to fix it, including pulling the CMOS battery, reformatting the hard drive, and trying to ‘auto-flash’ the BIOS from a USB drive – nothing worked. Powering it on resulted only in a pure black screen where after approximately fifteen seconds it flashed “Lenovo Misto Ontario”, and then nothing. Shortly after changing a setting in the BIOS related to SATA operation, the laptop suddenly stopped working after rebooting. A few months ago I was attempting to reformat my laptop as a dual-boot machine with both Ubuntu and Windows 10 and I was having issues getting the boot manager to properly detect both operating systems.
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