r/thinkpad•
Lanky-Goat6715

T480 thunderbolt flash chip seems to be boomed. (W25Q80.V)

Question / Problem

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

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