T480 thunderbolt flash chip seems to be boomed. (W25Q80.V)
I had an old Librebooted T480 that I was going to give to a friend but was in the process of flashing the stock BIOS and Thunderbolt firmware. The BIOS flash was successful and I was able to create two random read bins with the same contents/hash, but after trying to flash the Thunderbolt chip, I received this error:
Found Winbond flash chip "W25Q80.V" (1024 kB, SPI) on serprog.
Reading old flash chip contents... done.
Erasing and writing flash chip... Erase/write done.
Verifying flash... FAILED at 0x00004002! Expected=0x7f, Found=0x7e, failed byte count from 0x00000000-0x000fffff: 0xe3771
Your flash chip is in an unknown state.
And now I'm getting random shit every time I try to read the flash chip and none of the dumps match. There does seem to be a pattern to it though when comparing the dumps.
213052 377 152
213053 377 140
213054 377 71
213055 377 200
213056 377 324
213057 377 203
266364 3 0
266365 377 0
266366 377 0
266367 377 0
266368 377 0
266369 377 0
266370 377 37
331890 1 0
331902 0 77
331903 2 377
331904 0 377
331905 0 377
331906 10 377
331907 0 377
331908 0 377
331909 0 377
331910 0 377
331911 0 377
331912 0 377
331913 0 377
Do you guys think I would be better off just replacing the entire motherboard or buying a soldering iron and attempting to replace just the chip itself? As of right now the PC is not booting. I press the power button, the light turns on for about a second and then goes completely dead. There are no signs of life unless I disconnect and reconnect the battery then press the power button.
Posted Mar 14, 2026, 7:18 AM UTC