HP Probook 450 G1 "ME has been committed; It can not be committed again"

[Kekers]

Hello everyone!

Briefly, the main issue I have is with an HP Probook 450 G1 showing "WARNING!! Machine is not in committed state!" while the "Brand" tools show the following message:

ME has been committed
It can not be committed again
Failed to commit
Status = 80000000000007

What could be the cause for this?

Now I'll try to sum up what has been the process for me to attempt to repair this laptop as this is the first time I've had to deal with these sort of issues. Usually, I just deal with component level motherboard repair.

I was repairing an HP Probook 450 G1, which had a burned PCH and CPU. Replaced both of them (CPU had a downgrade from i7 to i3-4000M) to realize that the BIOS had a password set as well as long BIOS boot time - black screen for ~15 seconds and only then the HP logo shows up.

To reset the password, I reflashed the BIOS chip with various dumps I found online as I wanted to get it into MPM mode as well to change the HW info to the original values. The slow BIOS boot time was gone when I flashed the BIOS chip with another one, but then "WARNING!! Machine is not in committed state!" message appeared during boot. As I wanted to change the HW info, I had to get the machine into MPM mode as well, which none of the BIOS dumps did for some reason.

Finally, I figured I could try to rewrite the UUID in the BIOS dump to all FF's as I've come to understand that the SMC.bin included with the tools is for UUID with all FF's.

When I did that, it finally went into MPM mode (without the SMC.bin) alongside with "WARNING!! Machine is not in committed state!". Changed all of the HW info (UUID, feature byte, etc.) and pressed "Commit" in the wndmifit application, but the "WARNING!! Machine is not in committed state!" is still there.

I tried the "Brand" tools, but they fail with the following message:

ME has been committed
It can not be committed again
Failed to commit
Status = 80000000000007

What could be the cause for the machine to think that it is in an uncommitted state while the software "for committing" is sure that is is in an committed state?

I have attached in the ZIP archive both the original and current BIOS dumps.

Thank you for taking the time to read this post!

[SMDFlea]

Re: HP Probook 450 G1 "ME has been committed; It can not be committed again"

Try this bios .

[Kekers]

Re: HP Probook 450 G1 "ME has been committed; It can not be committed again"

Thank you, SMDFlea! You are an absolute legend!
Everything now works as it should!

By using ME Analyzer, I see that you downgraded the ME from 9.0.22.1467 -> 9.0.13.1402.
If this is not too much to ask, could you tell me how did you know that this would work? Is this due to the CPU downgrade or PCH change?

Furthermore, I tried to clean the ME with the guide you had posted here, but the Flash Image Tool (FIT) complained about the BIOS image:

Unfortunately, I figured that maybe I don't need to go down this road and ignored the ME cleaning part as I trusted that the BIOS images I found online had clean ME regions.
Do you know why FIT did not want to open my and your BIOS image? I just couldn't find a more elaborate error message to try to at least debug for myself.

I would just love to get to the solution by myself as well.

P.S. Saw your suggestion to read the full guide for ME Region Cleaning. Will get to it on the weekend!

[SMDFlea]

Re: HP Probook 450 G1 "ME has been committed; It can not be committed again"

When you first boot the machine the ME firmware becomes married to the PCH. You should always clean the ME after changing a PCH.You can`t always trust any bios you find online to have clean ME FW even if it says so in the title.The 9.0.14.1402 version is listed on the HP support page under Firmware (4) ,thats what i used,although you can upgrade or downgrade to a different version as long as its 9.0.x.x (not 9.1.x.x in most cases). Whenever you use FIT i find its best to always make a new folder on the desktop,or other working directory and copy FIT,the ME FW and bios into that folder, then delete the folder afterwards. Happy reading at win-raid its a good community over there .

[Kekers]

Re: HP Probook 450 G1 "ME has been committed; It can not be committed again"

Thank you SMDFlea for all the help and helpful tips!

I did not know that the version of the FIT tool is important as well as the newest version (11) did not work with my BIOS (showed the error message I shared previously). I just assumed that the newest version should work.

To clean the ME region by myself, I used FIT 9.1.10.1000 and it worked!

Happy holidays everyone!

[vienas111]

Re: HP Probook 450 G1 "ME has been committed; It can not be committed again"

Hello, could you tell me this BIOS Administrator password.
It's worked for me too, bet locked with password.

[Kekers]

Re: HP Probook 450 G1 "ME has been committed; It can not be committed again"

Hello, could you tell me this BIOS Administrator password.
It's worked for me too, bet locked with password.

Hi Vienas111,

If you are referring to the original BIOS dump I have, then it was part of the reason why I had to reflash the BIOS as the password was unknown (the machine was dead for so long that the owner just simply forgot the password).

Try the clean BIOS version SMDFlea posted, it should work. Unfortunately, I don't remember much from the repair as I have only done this once.

Hope it works out for you!