How to I fix my corrupted Intel ME (Management Engine) Acer Aspire V3-772G shuts off > 30 mins

Recently I suddenly started experiencing a sudden shutdown on my Acer Aspire V3-772G laptop. After a while I noted that this happened each time exactly 30 minutes after booting. A little research learned me that this must be a problem with the Intel Management Engine (ME or IME), which always will shut down the computer after 30 minutes when it concludes that its integrity fails.

I have no clou to what might have caused this, but now I am stuck with a laptop that operates no longer than 30 minutes before shutting down!

More on IME can be found here: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Intel_Management_Engine

I tried to find out how to establish the former state of ME to keep it from shutting down my laptop. The only possibly usable link that I found (on https://community.acer.com/en/kb/articles/9576-guidance-for-upgrading-the-me-firmware ) turned out to be a dead end ( https://us.answers.acer.com/app/answers/detail/a_id/47605 , because I get a blank page, except for the message:"Fatal Error Access Denied Reason: Client address is not authorized. (-here my IP number-)."

It would be very helpful if someone could point me to a solution for getting my laptop back to a normal working state, with the IME (Intel Management Engine) fixed and thus the 30 minute limit removed.

My OS is Ubuntu Linux 22.04.3 LTS , so a method applicable for that OS is preferred, but I could boot into an old Win 8 (which is very slow and hence not very practical on a system that has only 30 minutes to go) when it must be run under Windows OS.

Any help will be greatly appreciated.

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NutMonk

Additional to my above question: I also found this post:

https://community.acer.com/en/discussion/536358/how-can-i-update-intel-management-engine-firmware-from-linux

But the link provided there also gave the error page as a response.

StevenGen

https://community.acer.com/en/discussion/comment/1226610#Comment_1226610

Simplest way is to reinstall the OS and have the bios reflashed and see if the Me is reset and you don't get the 30min shutdown, then upgrade from your V3-772Gs 8.1 Pro or 8.1 OS to Win-10 Pro or Home as Acer has all the Win-10 drivers and bios for this laptop still available. So upgrade to Win-10 and use the same windows 25 key that is on the back of your laptop, as it will work and its still a free upgrade from Microsoft.

The V3772G can handle Win-10 quite well especially if you upgrade the boot drive to a 2.5" SSD that are pretty cheap these days, and run full ram capacity, as this laptop is very upgradable. I've got an old V3-571G and that operates perfectly on Win-10 pro with an 2.5" SSD and has since Win-10 was released. Have your laptop on dual boot if you want with Win-10 and Linux as well, as this laptop is recommended to operate with Linpus Linux as one of the OSs.

NutMonk

I appreciate it very much that you took the time to give an answer to my question. Thank you for that!

The solution you are offering seems rather complicated to me, as the OS you are referring to be upgraded is Windows 8 and my situation is that I initially changed that into had a dual boot with Windows 8 on the HD that came with the laptop and installed Ubuntu on an SSD besides the Windows.

Because I never used Windows 8, after getting Ubuntu in, I removed the HD from the laptop. Of course I can get the HD back again into the machine, which I actually recently did to see if the shutoff problem was OS-related (that was before finding out about ME and I know now that ME is operating on a much deeper level than the OS), but I was immediately struck by the immense lack of speed under the Windows OS when I booted into it.

Now it had been years that Windows received an update and when I did boot into it, it wanted to update itself of course, which I allowed, but the 30 minutes limit that ME imposed on the system prevented te completion of that, so I cancelled that just before the 30 minute time limit would pass.

For that matter it seems improbable to me that I could upgrade to Windows 10 at all.

{Apart from that, I do not have a sticker on the bottom of the V3 with the Windows key and when I remember well, the Windows version on the HD is not a Pro-version either.}

Another problem lies within the impossibility to re-flash the BIOS, because I tried this also, in the hope that it would reset the ME-firmware (which I understand now it does not, as the ME-fw resides on a deeper level than that so it would not solve my problem), but when I activated the flashing procedure I got a message that there was an error as the version that I wanted to flash into the BIOS was the same as the actual version of the BIOS. Which was a great disappointment of course, because I expected to overwrite it, but obviously it refused to do so, because the latest BIOS-version (the only one that I found that was available for this machine) was already installed.

So I am, to say in the least, hesitant to follow the suggested route. I really hoped for something more straightforward, but after searching for a few days and not finding anything of the kind I could have known that this must be a tough cookie. And again, I do appreciate it very much for your attempt to help me out.

Strangely enough it looks like Intel itself is not offering a doable way of solving these kind of issues, while they are the firm responsible for crippling my computer. I never asked for an "ME inside", which would be more fair to say than the slogan "Intel inside". I do not know what did cause ME to think that it lost its integrity, but I sure know that I did nothing to cause such a thing.

At the moment I am sure that reinstalling OS (be it Windows or Ubuntu) or flashing the BIOS will solve this ME-issue. From what I read about the Intel Management Engine, it is a very, very obfuscated processor that only Intel can address and which has acces to every computer function you can image without you yourself being able to control. People who are much more knowledgeable then we are place big question marks by the security threat such a device might give and wonder why we as end-users are not given control over it.

The least Intel could do is to give victims of their paranoia the possibility to reinstate this backdoor-like instrument into its original state so we do not have to deal with a crippled computer system shutting itself off after half an hour.

But I do not give up hope, the Hackaday-link that I mentioned in my original question pints to several (mostly very cumbersome) methods to trick the ME into thinking that it works fine so that the 30 minutes limit should go. Only thing I hope to encounter is a more user friendly way to do such a thing. Also the risk of bricking your machine with their methods is not very appealing to me.

Finally I hope to get a tip (here?) on how to solve this in a more easy fashion.

Commodore_1995#

Did you change the processor recently?

NutMonk

https://community.acer.com/en/discussion/comment/1226673#Comment_1226673

Well, as I wrote above: "I do not know what did cause ME to think that it lost its integrity, but I sure know that I did nothing to cause such a thing." Changing the processor would have been a thing that could have caused such a thing maybe, but I surely did not do anything like that.

Funny thing is that the only thing out of the ordinary is that I bought a cheap laptop stand with inbuilt ventilator that has two USB ports, one to connect the ventilator in the stand to a USB port on the laptop so that it can cool and the other one, I suppose to compensate for the loss of 1 port on the laptop while it is now occupied by the laptop-stand's ventilator.

I must admit that I considered the possibility that inside the stand something injected malware through the USB cable to cause this effect, but it seemed (still seems) very far fetched to me.

But who knows? It might be possible in a wild dream, but why and how advanced should this be !? It would mean that some Chinese producer of laptop stands knows about how to hack the Intel ME, a feat that would be enormous, because many hackers try these things and do not succeed. And to what purpose? Why hack a pc that will shut off after 30 minutes, a laptop that obviously does not belong to someone of importance as this cheap and a bit flimsy device did not exceed the costs of 10 euros.

And that is the only thing. For the rest this laptop has been running very close to 10 years in a row without serious problems.

About the 10 years: I read in a contribution on another forum that someone had this same problem and his laptop was also 10 years old. Speculating: could it be a some way of making old hardware obsolete, by making it unusable after a (long) period(of 10 years)? Then it could be a way to necessitate buying new hardware (from Intel, because that hardware is inside almost everything nowadays) to keep the company going. But also, this seems even more farfetched to me, as Intel does not need the extra money from the few freaks that use their computers that long, most people renew their pc's much more frequent, say at most after 4 to 5 years.

NutMonk

https://community.acer.com/en/discussion/comment/1226667#Comment_1226667

I am curious Joelglover, did you notice anything before this happened that might have caused this?

Also, what is your OS?

How old is the computer with this same problem??

NutMonk

Now the most curious thing happened this morning: the laptop with the Intel ME problem did NOT crash after half an hour this time, in fact at the moment it is still running for more than 180 minutes. Something changed, obviously, and that change cured its ill!

What I did not mention before is that I did run a tool from Intel to check the status of ME on the day that I started this thread (september 6th). That tool is called "CSME Version Detection Tool" by Intel. The output of that tool mentioned several things, apart from listing the OS and processor etc, it gave as output in my Linux terminal:

*** Risk Assessment ***
Detection Error: This system may be vulnerable,
either the Intel(R) MEI/TXEI driver is not installed
(available from your system manufacturer)
or the system manufacturer does not permit access
to the ME/TXE from the host driver.

While it also produced a log which mentioned among other things:

SPS: Failed to send/receive message over HECI using MMIO
Status: HECI_NOT_INSTALLED
Tool Stopped

When I read this, I searched for HECI, to find out that under the Linux OS this is called MEI and I posted a question about this on AskUbuntu (a forum for Ubuntu user questions), but I still did not get any response on that, so I was still in the dark.

This morning the laptop started and just before the half hour after which it would shut off, it was restarted manually, this happened a few times and after that it remained working to this very moment. If the manual restarting had anything to do with it remains a question (I do not think so, because I did this often before when working on it to prevent the sudden shutdown). Also no visible updating of the system took place as far as I know, or it should have been a silent upgrade.

Whatever it might have been: it is still working and because I wanted to know if anything changed in respect to the Intel ME, I again ran the CSME Version Detection Tool from Intel and it gave another output indeed!

This time the output on the terminal screen was:

*** Risk Assessment ***
Based on the analysis performed by this tool: The system is not supported
Firmware versions of Intel(R) ME 3.x thru 10.x,
Intel(R) TXE 1.x thru 2.x and Intel(R) Server Platform Services 1.x thru 2.x are no longer supported,
thus were not assessed for the vulnerabilities/CVEs listed in these Security Advisories.
There is no new release planned for these versions.

And the accompanying log said:

Engine: Intel(R) ME
Version: 9.0.3.1347
Status: NOT_SUPPORTED
Tool Stopped

So my conclusion is that the Intel ME did disappear for whatever reason it may have…

And with the disappearance of ME, the 30 minute limit also disappeared 😍

Commodore_1995#

Can you tell me the bios version?

NutMonk

@egydiocoelho: the BIOS-version is 1.15

NutMonk

For those of you who have similar problems, I can point you to my (self-answered) question on the AskUbuntu-forum where I gave my suggestion for a solution based on what I found in my system-log after the normal situation had been restored. Actually the situation had altered, in the sense that ME was not longer to be found by the CSME Version Detection Tool. My best guess is that a firmware update (as seen in my log) saved my day.

You can read more about it on AskUbuntu here.

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