[kinda-off-topic] Weird complications

[TooStupidForThis]

I was trying to apply me_cleaner to my notebook just yesterday. I chose external flashing as my method of dumping/modifying the flash chip containing the ME. So I opened the thing up, had to remove the entire mainboard but finally found the chip. It was a winbond 25Q64CVSIG SPI flash. Luckily I had an SPI flasher laying around (CH341A @ 3.3V) so I attached my SOIC clip to the chip as shown in the pinout (took me some tries due to stupid motherboard layout with resistors all over the place and the clip slipping off). Flashrom detected it correctly and tried to pull the firmware off. The hexdumps of the first few firmwares looked okay, but were all different. At the fourth or fifth try dumping the flash I noticed it returning mostly 0xFF bytes (with some nonsense inbetween). Being puzzled, I put the thing back together to abort my mission. I hit the power switch and nothing at all happened. Charger light didn't respond to the power cable anymore. Fans didn't move, no sounds/blinking whatsoever.

Things I did:

• took out the CMOS battery for around an hour, didn't work
• probed some things on the mainboard with a multimeter, SPI flash seems to have 3.3V supply

The thing astonishing me most is that I only tried to read off the chip and somehow managed to brick the damn thing. Any help is greatly appreciated!

[xinterix]

I have read comments on i think it was amazon review for that type of spi programmer CH341A, from customers reporting similar problems. the dumps different each time. it probably faulty, have you tried with on other chips and got equal ones?

[dartraiden]

Flashing with clip is unsafe. It's better to unsolder the chip.