[Compatibility] Success on Lenovo Ideapad Gaming 3i - 15IMH05 (Coffee Lake)

[mvildosolae]

Hi everyone!

I'm using a Lenovo Ideapad Gaming 3i (i5-10300H, HM470, ME v.14).

Through UEFI advanced settings, I could find the “ME State” toggle, which puts the ME into the “temporarily disabled” mode.

While the laptop boots and I think everything is working, there's a single flaw: the laptop does not turn off. I can shutdown the OS and the screen turns off, but the fans keep going, the keyboard backlight does not turn off. I have to long-press the power button to manually turn it off.

So, I have some questions for you:

1. What's the practical difference between using me_cleaner to set the AltMeDisable bit vs. using the ME State toggle?
2. Perhaps there's an ACPI or other UEFI setup thing to fix the issue with the machine not turning off?
3. If I used me_cleaner, would I have the same issue I described?

Thanks in advance!

EDIT: It seems this has been somewhat discussed here. The consensus seems to be that “Temporarily Disabled” is not a definite solution, causing issues like the one I experienced.

That being said, I am not sure if me_cleaner has been successfully used in Comet Lake. My UEFI/BIOS is already unlocked and can be flashed through FPTW64.

[mvildosolae]

I've got an update!
I finally got a CH341a programmer and dared to flash stuff on this laptop (though I had already modded some things, like adding ReBAR support).

The flash descriptor (FD) on this laptop is read-only, so I first hex-edited my SPI dump to enable reading and writing to all regions. Then, I flashed it using the CH341a programmer, which worked nicely (FPT reported read/write permissions for all regions).

Since everything was unlocked now, I didn't need to use the CH341a anymore.

I followed part of this article on how to disable Intel ME on NUCs, specifically steps 4 and 7.

The UEFI and MEInfo correctly reported “Alt Disable Mode” as “ModeOfOperation”. Booting takes some additional seconds after pressing the power button, though this became shorter after disabling ME from the UEFI.

I haven't found any other issues (the laptop correctly shuts down, as opposed to when I just temporarily disabled ME in my original post).

So, it's a success on this laptop, as long as you have an external programmer for flashing.