flashrom

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This wiki is retired

Our website is https://www.flashrom.org, instructions on how to add or update documentation are here

All wiki content available in read-only mode at wiki.flashrom.org

flashrom is a utility for identifying, reading, writing, verifying and erasing flash chips. It is designed to flash BIOS/EFI/coreboot/firmware/optionROM images on mainboards, network/graphics/storage controller cards, and various other programmer devices.

  • Supports more than 476 flash chips, 291 chipsets, 500 mainboards, 79 PCI devices, 17 USB devices and various parallel/serial port-based programmers.
  • Supports parallel, LPC, FWH and SPI flash interfaces and various chip packages (DIP32, PLCC32, DIP8, SO8/SOIC8, TSOP32, TSOP40, TSOP48, BGA and more)
  • No physical access needed, root access is sufficient (not needed for some programmers).
  • No bootable floppy disk, bootable CD-ROM or other media needed.
  • No keyboard or monitor needed. Simply reflash remotely via SSH.
  • No instant reboot needed. Reflash your chip in a running system, verify it, be happy. The new firmware will be present next time you boot.
  • Crossflashing and hotflashing is possible as long as the flash chips are electrically and logically compatible (same protocol). Great for recovery.
  • Scriptability. Reflash a whole pool of identical machines at the same time from the command line. It is recommended to check flashrom output and error codes.
  • Speed. flashrom is often much faster than most vendor flash tools.
  • Portability. Supports DOS, Linux, FreeBSD (including Debian/kFreeBSD), NetBSD, OpenBSD, DragonFlyBSD, anything Solaris-like, Mac OS X, and other Unix-like OSes as well as GNU Hurd. Partial Windows support is available (no internal programmer support at the moment, hence no "BIOS flashing").

Emergency help

IMPORTANT: If something went wrong during flashing, do NOT turn off/reboot your computer. Instead, let us help you recover. We can be contacted via IRC (#flashrom on libera.chat, webchat) or email. Please allow for a few hours until someone responds on IRC, we're all volunteers.

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