Success in recovering from bad BIOS upgrade - Framework 13 AMD 7040

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Here’s a few other community posts that I believe hit the same issue as me:

  1. From April 2024 - Framework 13 AMD 7040, updating BIOS from 3.03 to 3.05. Looks like this one got bricked. OP described a “graphical glitch” during the update process, but no picture attached.
  2. From June 2024 - Framework 16 (assuming AMD 7040), not sure which BIOS versions were involved. Interestingly, in this case the poster said that after letting the battery die, the system came back up and completed the update. OP provided a picture showing the same “triangle of death” that I encountered.
  3. From January 2025 - Framework 16 AMD 7040, updating BIOS from 3.03 to something (likely 3.05). I’m guessing it got bricked, but can’t say for certain, since the OP only described the system being totally hung and the same graphical glitch (triangle of death) that I hit.

I’d also like to mention that I witnessed this graphical glitch as it happened. It didn’t just suddenly “appear” in a single frame. Instead, it started from middle-ish of the screen (the top of the “glitch”), then proceeded one horizontal line at a time down the screen. It happened relatively slowly - it definitely took at least 20 seconds until the glitch grew to the bottom of the screen. This screams to me like some sort of memory access going off-the-rails…

Really wish I could get the attention of a @framework-qualified-engineer here - I feel like getting the flash dump from the bricked device into the right hands could really help troubleshoot what is going wrong… Last night I was considering hooking my hacky 30 gauge wires back up to the SPI flash so I could flash the bad image on again and confirm I could reproduce the bricked behavior. But then I came to my senses and decided I shouldn’t push my luck by using a 700°F soldering iron multiple times on the same component.

I initially didn’t want to post my bad flash image here in case there was anything sensitive in it, but after considering it more, I’ve decided there is nothing in there I wouldn’t be willing to share publicly.

So, here’s a google drive link to a tarball that contains two files:

  1. fw-bios-bricked.bin: This is the flash dump from my laptop when it was bricked.
  2. fw-bios-3.07-from-capsule.bin: This is the image I wrote (in its entirety) to my SPI flash chip that made my laptop work again. I got this from the 3.07 update capsule file as described in my comment above - you can confirm with the md5sum (sorry I didn’t use sha256 or better) or you can extract it yourself following the instructions I provided.

Hopefully someone sees this and can look into the problem. I have a hunch this has happened to more people, and that reports of it on the forums will ramp up as more warranties begin to expire.

Cheers!

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