Intel Management Engine Help

Hi
Same model, same problem.
did A LOT of research. and tried everything I found.
Sadly, no success. For now.
Just want to give a heads up:

You might know, that a whole lot of devices of all manufactures are affected.
I found a lot of cases for Dell, HP, Lenovo. It seems its an issue caused by intel / microsoft.

Some users of server-hardware found out, that the 30min limit is a feature intel uses to protect their business model to sell the same hardware as different classes with different features. So if one tries to run a desktop-cpu in an expensive server mainbaoard (chipset) this works, but is beeing shut down after 30 minutes to get people to buy the far more expensive Xeon hardware.

Something similar (or probably the same cause) seems to kick in, when the different versions of the intel me / csme components, the system bios and the processor firmware do not comply with each others - more precise, their firmware versions are not compatible.
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I found some threads, that, very compellingly, state, that this issue is caused by windows updates of the intel cpu microcode, that should NOT have been done, until the BIOS and / or ME/CSME/TXE (trusted execution engine) or AMT (Active Management Technology) firmware has been updated (or beeing checked for compability).
https://support.microsoft.com/en-us/help/4093836/summary-of-intel-microcode-updates
https://support.microsoft.com/en-us/help/4497165/kb4497165-intel-microcode-updates

If it is caused by a wrong ME firmware, I think I remember, that I read that, this device is shipped with 10.0.0.0 or something low and is beeing updated to something like 10.0.0.60 or similar.
https://www.intel.com/content/www/us/en/security-center/advisory/intel-sa-00141.html
Maybe there is even a higher major version installed, like 11, 12 ... - but I don´t know.

So I don´t know who caused this bad update, but I generally like to blame intel and microsoft the same. And a whole lot.
;-)

Now, how to fix this?
I do not actually know. But I may have some clues or guesses, that might work for you or give you an idea what to work on.

- intel released a lot of microcode updates, especially because of the spectre / meltdown fails.
  You will find testing-tools (me-analyzer, verification tool) for this issues for modern (generation 6 to 10) and 'legacy' cpu generations. Since the 791g is generation 4, we´ll use the legacy one. https://downloadcenter.intel.com/en/product/34227/Intel-Management-Engine
  It seems that devices, affected by this 30 min issue, can not run these updates or maybe even the test suites.
  From them you will get a message like: "this device (or plattform?) is not supported."

  Try to view the Intel Management Engine in the device manager.
  Even with the command-line commands
set devmgr_show_nonpresent_devices=1
start devmgmt.msc
 and the menu-option to show hidden devices in the device manager, no intel Management Engine device shows up.

- To update the CSME microcode/firmware, first it needs to be accessable by the operating system.
Luckily there's a driver for that: called  MEI/TXE or ME driver. Or something else. Depending on the mood of ... someone.
Available by your thoughtful and trusted device manufacturer, in this case, acer.

Now this me device driver needs to be installed. An installation process that ends itself, when it does not find the ME device, as usual in our situation. You will see something like "this device (or plattform?) is not supported."
The logfiles in c:\intel\ should show some listing of supported devices and below a line, like this system / hardware is not supported.
we're stuck. already.

Until now I backed off of installing / trying tools from other OEMs like HP, Dell, Lenovo on this acer notebook. Might be a try, but maybe later.


This would not have happend using linux.
I think.

So, lets try Linux for the rescue.
Its distributors also provide intel firmware / microcode updates and so linux must have some kind of 'ME device driver', too.
And it has.
Sadly, as far as I experienced, this does not help us.
The detection-tools for the spectre/meltdown fail, that should detect the running firmware-version, fails on linux too. It also does not find a supported device.
what a pitty.

I run linux mint, based on ubuntu 18.40, by default. Some documentation I found, suggests running intels tools on ubuntu 16.4, which I am on right now. Sadly this does not make a difference. Also I hope for the Linux update managers to, accidently, find and install some correct firmware, but til now this did not happen.

There is a quite smart, german, knowledge-database of the webhoster thomas-krenn:
https://www.thomas-krenn.com/de/wiki/Hauptseite
https://www.thomas-krenn.com/de/wiki/Intel_Microcode#Microcode_Versionen
Even though they care about their server hardware, I learned a lot of stuff there. Try it, if you understand german.

Also there are this guys, that seem to be very competent and doing a good job:
https://www.win-raid.com/t596f39-Intel-Management-Engine-Drivers-Firmware-amp-System-Tools.html
Sadly their rich collection of tools suffer the same issue as the ones I already mentioned: device not supported.

That's it for now.
I know that these are mostly theories I collected on several sites. No really hard evidence, due to the fact, that this issue prevents to collect hard facts.

If you know anything more, let us know.

All the best and good luck!