[molticrystal]

> would have been much easier if I'd had a Bus Pirate and SOP8 adapter to clip onto the IC while it was still on the motherboard. >I decide to remove it from the motherboard

For those who want to avoid soldering(unavoidable if chip is bad), SOP8 clips are very cheap on ebay.

There are many alternatives to the STM32 dev board used in the article, common ones are raspberry pi's such as the zero w(what I tend to use, requires some config changes), but also SPI to USB adapters for PC. Always read the flash several times to increase the likelihood you got an error free read, and also read it after writing as well.

Having a working setup able to read and write spi flash is very inexpensive and a handy emergency skill to have.

[h3xk1tt3n]

I used one of those clips and a raspberry pi to reflash an HP all-in-one that was bricked. I was super proud of it, but then it was destroyed in shipping on its way to the customer.

[Scoundreller]

I miss rs232 and parallel ports that made stuff like this trivially easy with just diodes and resistors.