You make a big confusion. It's about L560. Not about L540
L560 it doesn't have EEPROM
Many beginners make confusion beetwin SPI flash 25Xxxx and EEPROM's, and they short the BIOS chip.
holu00
I suggest you to leave HDD/SDD removed from your notebook. Start and check if you have password without HDD.
If you have password patch the BIOS, run it, put back the original BIOS and check if password is gone. If it is, put back your HDD. If ask for password is clear that your HDD is password protected.
Do you know to use UEFITool ?
Since I did get a 2x5 beeps and a black screen on my l560 test system lenovo had won. I bought a used motherboard without a SVP for 160 US$. The first thing I did was to deactivate Computrace.
I learnt
how to read/write from the UEFI bios chip using SOIC-8 hardware,
how to identify addresses in UEFITool_0.28.0_linux_x86_64 or UEFITool_NE_A57_linux_x86_64
how to read/edit HEX files and it's addresses using Bless,
how to compare HEX files using Meld
how to replace a motherboard (I did not know how tiny fingers you need)
I did not learn how to patch an UEFI bios on my own because provided files did not work or documentation is limited/not detailed enough. Since I do not know what is added to the UEFI bios if I provide any bin dump here I will be happy to not having done so. Security for my system is crucial.
Applying reverse engineering techniques with e.g. IDA Pro to proprietary software from Lenovo is interesting but it costs so much time. Next time I will check if laptops are compatible to open source bios's (e.g. coreboot or libreboot) which I will prefer. Unfortunately l560 is not supported right now.
I hope that Lenovo will allow open source bios's in the future. If not customers will change their consumption like me.
I know that!
It's so hard to read both chip's?
I don't know how others patch the BIOS. But in my case, after patching the BIOS, checksum is verified and recalculated by the tool. It can't be done without full image of the BIOS.
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