Bios locked lot of 12.....

[Thinklab]

Hi there all,

I am new to this forum, so I will introduce my self briefly; My name is Shannon and I?m an Australian repair bloke from NSW.

This is my conundrum; I knowingly bought 12x 2015 13? MacBook Airs at an auction for a good price from a corporate liquidation, but they all have Bios locks and no SSDs. Now this was made clear in the lots listing and also that the passwords where unknown.

I have the equipment to back up and reflash each chip but I do not have 12 donor boards, nor do I have any idea how to clean the me regions. I have a few clean donor chips and I am wondering weather there would be a problem with flashing multiple chips with the same copy of the clean chips data other then then having duplicate serial numbers.

Im curious as to what a few pros think of my situation and how they would work around it?

Thanking you Shannon Wright

 

[2informaticos]

Welcome to the forum.
Fastest option is buying Medusa 2/3 programmer and you can remove password on each machine, without desoldering anything.
http://www.cmizapper.com/
If you plan to repair Apple stuf, is a must have tool.

Another option, in case you want to fix some of them before geting the Medusa:
- make backup and upload somewhere each BIOS; be sure you know which boards corresponds.
- password can be removed and you must rewrite each BIOS chip with the new file.

 

[Thinklab]

Thanks for the reply 2informaticos,

Yes I know vaguely of the medusa device, and I have done many MacBooks and am quite experienced in it, though I have never done bios lock removal in the past because of the shady characters that generally request it. I have toe gear to flash the chips and even a few clean chips to clone, and I'm fully capable if pulling and resetting all the chips I need to. I have done about 50 smc jobs alone so the bios is not a problem at all.

what my concern was, is whether or not it is going to be a problem having several machines with duplicate serial numbers after cloning bios chips? as I do not know how to rewrite the code in order to change the serial numbers or just to clean the me region.

 

[2informaticos]

You can have problems leting such many machines with the same serial.
In fact machine owners can have the problems, but will finally complain to you.
Also need to clean ME region every time you pass working BIOS file from one board to other.
Changing serial number also requires fix checksum.

Password removal can be done with some software.
In this case, you don't need to change anything else on the BIOS file.
But will be a tedious job to desolder/resolder each BIOS chip.

 

[Thinklab]

I could not find any consistent reliable information about the subject on line so I ended up comparing a locked bios to an unlocked one and found the password region. After 3 attempts I cleaned the first one sucsessfully after backing it up thoroughly. Then proceeded to hotair and flash all 12.......Talking about a tedious job....You were not wrong! It was sort of like "biting my own neck"!

They all still have their original serial numbers and login to iCloud fine and the App Store, about this Mac all checks out fine as well.

I found out through trial and error that an unlocked bios can have a clean new uninitiated ME region injected if need be and the bios can then be matched to a new cpu and ram array, as the me region stores the ram and cpu hashes for life once first matched.

I experimented with putting a new serial number on the bios but apple App Store, iCloud and about this Mac will not recognise it if is not a genuine serial number.

Out of interest I trialed many things! All up including the time spent di#king around with different ideas I spent 40hrs on the project. Stressfull, tedious, and annoying, but also very interesting fiasco!

Thank you very much for your interactions 2informaticos