Backing Up Your X99 BIOS on Linux with flashrom

A 5-minute job that could save your board one day.

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If you have an ASUS X99-E WS (or any X99 board) running Linux and want a full BIOS backup before modding firmware — Intel's own Flash Programming Tool (FPT) is a dead end. The ME System Tools v9.1 package ships a Linux MEInfo binary but no Linux FPT. Intel only added FPT for Linux in v12+, which won't run on ME 9.x hardware.

The answer is flashrom — open-source, in Debian's repos, and purpose-built for this.

Install

apt install flashrom

Dump the full 16 MB SPI flash

flashrom -p internal -r x99_ews_backup.bin

On a stock X99-E WS you'll see all four flash regions reported as read-write:

Found chipset "Intel C610/X99 (Wellsburg)".
FREG0: Flash Descriptor region (0x00000000-0x00000fff) is read-write.
FREG1: BIOS region (0x00180000-0x00ffffff) is read-write.
FREG2: Management Engine region (0x00003000-0x0017ffff) is read-write.
FREG3: Gigabit Ethernet region (0x00001000-0x00002fff) is read-write.
Found Winbond flash chip "W25Q128.V" (16384 kB, SPI) mapped at physical address ...
Reading flash... done.

ASUS ships the X99-E WS with the SPI descriptor fully open — no read restrictions. This is not guaranteed on all boards.

Verify the dump

Run md5sum twice. Both hashes must match:

md5sum x99_ews_backup.bin
md5sum x99_ews_backup.bin

Two matching hashes rule out SPI bus glitching or a partial read.

What's in the 16 MB image

Region	Range	Contents
Descriptor	0x000000–0x000FFF	Flash layout + region access rights
GbE	0x001000–0x002FFF	Intel NIC MAC address + config
ME	0x003000–0x17FFFF	Intel Management Engine firmware
BIOS	0x180000–0xFFFFFF	UEFI firmware (AMI v4001)

The GbE region is why a full-chip backup beats a BIOS-region-only dump — your board's MAC address lives there. A BIOS-only restore zeros it out.

Copy off the machine

scp root@pve2:/root/x99_ews_backup.bin ~/backups/

Keep a copy off-site. A backup that lives only on the machine you're about to mod isn't much of a backup.

Restore (if needed)

flashrom -p internal -w x99_ews_backup.bin