[REQUEST] Dell Precision T3500 BIOS Unlock

[StarPrince]

Hello Sml,

Im sorry for any confusion occurred but it wasn't intended for sure, however, this post is for modding Precision T3500 UEFI/Secure Boot of latest bios version A17 exactely as you mentioned, the second thing about latitude 3340 i just gave it as an example if we can extract anything from this type of bios as it is already UEFI/Secure Boot included in the bios, just for our research for T3500 modding purpose, that is all.

[Sml6397]

Terribly sorry, forgot about this request.

I will open the 3500 BIOS update tonight and begin looking for strings from the BIOS menu screenshots in this thread. If I can find them in plain text, then this gives me a lot to go on in terms of figuring out a way to unlock or unhide settings. If I am able to make progress, I will post regular updates.

[Sml6397]

I have found the module that contains most of the strings that show up in the BIOS menus. It is titled "3C_6.ROM". The module is 347KB, the third largest module. You can find this module by running "T3500A17.exe -writehdrfile" (Hint: if running in Powershell, type "./" before the command).

A section of the file beginning at offset 0x21920 can be seen in the attached photo. You may notice that many of the strings there are the names of the top level menus in your BIOS Setup Utility.

Now we have to figure out what calls to those strings. In a standard (ie: non-Dell) Phoenix BIOS, you would take the beginning offset of a menu/sub-menu/setting string (in the STRINGS module), flip the bytes (Little Endian), search for it in the large jump table near the beginning portion of the file it shows up in (STRINGS), take the result's beginning offset, and search for those two bytes reversed in another module (TEMPLAT). This would take you to two bytes after the beginning of the set of bytes that handles that particular menu/sub-menu/setting. This set of bytes is usually 16-32 bytes long, with the size specified by the second byte from the beginning of the set of bytes.

I suspect that we will likely encounter something along these lines, though it is too early to close off other options. Essentially, we want to find the internal (same module) or external (different module) reference that calls these strings found in the 3C_6.ROM file.

I will post further updates as I learn more.

[ITronLegends]

Interesting. I don't know anything about this so...

[Sml6397]

Apologies again. I have been very slow at responding on this thread and making progress.

I am afraid I have bad news. I am not seeing a UEFI Boot setting hidden in this BIOS image . I'm not even seeing the term "UEFI" anywhere in the BIOS image. Further, this BIOS image does not look like UEFI at all comparing it to other UEFI images. "Secure boot" was also nowhere to be found, probably because it is a UEFI functionality.

At this time, I am not sure how to import UEFI Boot capabilities from the BIOS image for the T3600. It is probably impossible. As for whether the T3600 could be flashed on the T3500, I would say that too is almost certainly impossible as UEFI and BIOS have completely different structural makeups. Yours is BIOS.

I know this news wasn't what anyone wanted to hear, especially after this much time.

[ITronLegends]

How about the latuide notebook? Could we import that uefi? As intel bootgaurd thingy is disabled

[Sml6397]

The Dell Latitude 3340 definitely uses UEFI and not BIOS. It seems to already have quite a few accessible menus and settings according to the images posted by StarPrince on the second (I think) page of this thread.

Are you looking for the option to choose Legacy boot (as opposed to UEFI Boot)? I noticed that one is grayed out. Are you also looking for "Secure Boot"?

Full disclosure, this UEFI looks different from others I have seen before. It looks like Dell has special, non-standard versions of both their Phoenix BIOS and Phoenix UEFI firmwares... I know someone who might know how to modify this if you are looking for the "Legacy Boot" option and the "Secure Boot" setting.

[ITronLegends]

No sorry i was talking about adding the uefi code (from the latatuide) into the legacy code (dell t3500)
One more thing i found that some X58 motherboards do support uefi (asus)
How about we put the code from the asus bios? Or just use the asus bios?

[StarPrince]

Hey SML

we need just uefi/secureboot option into precision t3500 bios, i wondered if my latitude we can import some coding from it to use it in the t3500 bios, it is all about this kind of pc ( precision t3500 A17 bios)

Hey Itron
i think that would be great to give us (attach it) here other kinds of uefi bioses which got from asus X58 motherboard, it can massively aid us for this research

[ITronLegends]

Looks like i found 2 one from msi and asus. People say these have uefi and some people dont so..not sure. For some reason my phone doesnt alow sending downloads so.. here are the motherboard names. Asus sabertooth x58 and MSI's X58 Eclipse.