Insyde unlocking Bios Hidden Setting

[MindedOne]

but what does one do when the manufacturer doesn't post the bios file on it's website?

You can get an Insyde bios by doing:
flashit backup.fd /G

To just enable the hidden menu, try comparing before and after with the D2D recovery enabled and disabled.

After days of looking I hadn't been able to find a version of flashit for whatever reason, but strangely enough, after one search on another topic, a bios backup utility showed up! Mind you, I know absolutely nothing about this, but when I ran the utility it pulled out a rom, not an fd or bin. is that ok?

[sstahlman]

I would tread carefully if you're so new to this; you could very well render your computer unusable...

You can call the backed up BIOS file whatever you please; backup.fd... backup.bin... MyBIOS.rom, whatever you find most suitable. Usually flashit will come with your manufacturer's BIOS releases. What board do you have, that the manufacturer doesn't post releases? That's somewhat odd.

[MindedOne]

I would tread carefully if you're so new to this; you could very well render your computer unusable...

You can call the backed up BIOS file whatever you please; backup.fd... backup.bin... MyBIOS.rom, whatever you find most suitable. Usually flashit will come with your manufacturer's BIOS releases. What board do you have, that the manufacturer doesn't post releases? That's somewhat odd.

a1767191a mbx-216

It's a sony vaio vpcs111fm...

What they have on their website is a utility to search and download upgrades, but not the file separate. My current version is R0310Q3

[sstahlman]

You look to be right; though, their installer does toss a bunch into the \temp folder, but I don't see (at a glance) where it's extracting the BIOS; might just be part of the .exe. Gotta love Sony. Be very very careful about playing with your laptop BIOS if your model doesn't have the crisis recovery stuff... (check: Open your BIOS (the backup.fd you made) in a hex editor, search for $BVDT$ and after it you'll find $V1.35 (your version number) and a bit later you'll find $JM41 (crisis recovery string))

[MindedOne]

You look to be right; though, their installer does toss a bunch into the \temp folder, but I don't see (at a glance) where it's extracting the BIOS; might just be part of the .exe. Gotta love Sony. Be very very careful about playing with your laptop BIOS if your model doesn't have the crisis recovery stuff... (check: Open your BIOS (the backup.fd you made) in a hex editor, search for $BVDT$ and after it you'll find $V1.35 (your version number) and a bit later you'll find $JM41 (crisis recovery string))

I really appreciate your help, tbh I'm not even going to touch it right now on account of the cold medicine making me drowsy; it's mad enough I'm inexperienced, I don't want to add to the dangers...I'm not worried about bricking the system though, I'm backed up and I have accidental damage on this in case I do something stupid. Pour a little coffee on the mobo and voila, another computer.

[sstahlman]

But, my friend, the coffee's for you, not the computer! ;-)

[MindedOne]

$BVDT$ 0$&!$R0310Q3

That's the string of characters I see. Is there any type of emulator like modbin6 that I could use? I'll look through the forums, but unfortunately modbin won't pull up my rom file, giving me an error that it is not version 6.0.