4GB RAM support for Amilo Xi1546

[stezkamilan]

Hi,

i have a modification request regarding RAM support. Fujitsu-Siemens Amilo Xi1546 is built on a i945PM chipset and with all Fujitsu Siemens BIOSes, it supports a maximum of 2,5 GB ram (i get only black screen when i try to put in more than 2,5GB). i945PM chipset supports 4GB though.

Notebook made by another vendor Alienware uses the same Uniwill motherboard and is basically just a rebranded model called m5750. Alienware BIOS supports 4GB of RAM. Alienware BIOS can be used in the Amilo notebook which effectively enables the 4GB of RAM, but there is a catch. The Alienware BIOSes do not support upgraded MXM graphic cards. The graphics then are only 800x600 with 4 bit colors. Device manager reports a resource conflict of the video card.

So the request is following - would it be possible to take the RAM initialization routine from the Alienware BIOS and insert it into the Fujitsu-Siemens BIOS?

I know that I am asking quite a lot. It would be enough if anybody would just point me into the right bios module where the RAM initialization takes place and I would try to do the reverse engineering myself.

This issue is reported by all upgrade-aware users of Xi1546 and it would be an awesome breakthrough for all of them (and me) if this was finally resolved, because we want up to date graphic cards AND up to date amount of RAM. Both is not possible simultaneously yet.

Both BIOSes (Phoenix) are included as attachments.

[TheWiz]

Well, the way you have told me, it sounds like you've tried both bioses. The Rerverse engineering RAM stuff forget it. Rrather, it might be very possible to extract the VGA ROM from one into the one that has the 4GB RAM support.

TheWiz

[stezkamilan]

Well, the way you have told me, it sounds like you've tried both bioses. The Rerverse engineering RAM stuff forget it. Rrather, it might be very possible to extract the VGA ROM from one into the one that has the 4GB RAM support.

TheWiz

Can you suggest where should i look for the VGA ROM in the sBIOS?

[knugarn]

Thanks for posting this request, I guess there's many of us who's dying to see this combo of the full 4gigs + upgraded VGA made possible. I'm not the guy who knows how to pull such a feat off, but I sure wish I could... well, I'm gonna be cheering for any individual who can make this happen.

I hope you get the info you need, and if so, I wish you all the luck, stezkamilan!

[TheWiz]

Do you want me to just do the MOD for you. In CBROM it shows you which VGA ROMS are in there.

TheWiz

[Crispii]

first off all i want to say hello! i'm new!

And i have a question...

did you make modifications to one of the bios?

if not can you do it? because i have the same problem as him and i already bought 4 gb of RAM and i can't return it anymore!!

[Crispii]

Anyone?

[TheWiz]

Hi Crispii,

We weren't able to re-program the memory initialization for this BIOS, but we will forward this to our research team for further analysis.

Thanks,
TheWiz

[Dansolo]

I looked into the VGA ROM part using Phoenix BIOS Editor and I do not see an Option ROM for video. It appears that this machine uses an MXM card for video and there are a couple of HOLE files that seem to be for that, but the actual ROM may be on the MXM card itself. I don't deal with laptops all that much so I am not 100% sure.

Of course, PBE does note some unrecognized modules in the BIOS, so one of those could be an OROM for the video that I just can't see.

I am not that familiar with Phoenix BIOS so this may be already known or otherwise useless, but I was looking through the files that PBE does see and:

-The only recognizable strings in BIOSCOD0 are parttbl and patch... so I assume this has something to do with the reading of the partition table...
-BIOSCOD1 has a lot of recognizable strings dealing with the chipset, PCI-E, etc... and is probably a bad idea to touch without getting way deep in assembly
-BIOSCOD2 seems to be for booting from CDROM
-BIOSCOD3 is something I can't make sense of from a hex editor... it's small so this is a candidate for comparison to modules from, say, the Alienware (if it uses the same Phoenix BIOS base)
-BIOSCOD4 is IDE-related
-BIOSCOD5 references Phoenix FirstDisk which seems to be related to their FirstBIOS base, even though this is actually Phoenix TrustedCore (ROMEXEC0 states such) - maybe it was built on top of FirstBIOS
-BIOSCOD6 is mostly stuff I can't make sense of though it does have strings for multiple I/O BUS types (EISA, VL, PCI, etc.) - either more core code, or I/O specific code
-MOD_4800 seems related to USB input
-MOD_4B00 I would guess to be related to I/O, possibly hard drive
-MOD_5100 is SATA-related

The display and other mod files are tiny and I have no idea what they do... What does all this mean? Not much to me. My assembly-fu is quite weak so I'm not even going to try looking at this in IDA.

[Crispii]

sooowwww..
Is there any progress in the analysis??