I think I see what the issue is now. Reading the man page for flashrom, it
says:
"Using flashrom on laptops is dangerous and may easily make your hardware
unusable (see also the BUGS section). The embedded controller (EC) in these
machines often interacts badly with flashing. http://www.flashrom.org/Laptops
has more information. For example the EC firmware sometimes resides on the
same flash chip as the host firmware. While flashrom tries to change the
contents of that memory the EC might need to fetch new instructions or data
from it and could stop working correctly. Probing for and reading from the
chip may also irritate your EC and cause fan failure, backlight failure,
sudden poweroff, and other nasty effects. flashrom will attempt to detect if
it is running on a laptop and abort immediately for safety reasons if it
clearly identifies the host computer as one. If you want to proceed anyway at
your own risk, use flashrom -p internal:laptop=force_I_want_a_brick We will
not help you if you force flashing on a laptop because this is a really dumb
idea."
I wouldn't have thought that merely trying to read the ROM image would risk
any adverse effect on the system.
