[REQUEST] HP Mini 5102 wlan whitelist removal

[ryley]

Hey guys, I'm hoping to remove the BIOS whitelist on my HP mini 5102. The wifi card at the moment is a Broadcom 43224 (vendor id 14e4, device id 4353). I'm hoping to replace this with an Intel 6235 (It's being delivered, so I don't have the PCI id for this unfortunately).

My current BIOS is available here: ftp://ftp.hp.com/pub/softpaq/sp54501-55000/sp54640.exe . It is version 68PGU.F20. I was going to modify it myself, but I realised it was a "ROMPAQ" bios, and I couldn't find any guides for this. The user camiloml was able to remove the whitelist for a ROMPAQ bios here: http://www.bios-mods.com/forum/Thread-Re...-Mini-2140 , so if he or someone else could at least get me started, it would really be appreciated.

If any more info is needed about my system, just ask.

Thanks in advance,

ryley

EDIT: Andy's Phonextool reports this BIOS as being an "Insyde BIOS" and as far as I can tell, its not encrypted

[ryley]

Hey guys, I'm hoping to remove the BIOS whitelist on my HP mini 5102. The wifi card at the moment is a Broadcom 43224 (vendor id 14e4, device id 4353). I'm hoping to replace this with an Intel 6235 (It's being delivered, so I don't have the PCI id for this unfortunately).

My current BIOS is available here: ftp://ftp.hp.com/pub/softpaq/sp54501-55000/sp54640.exe . It is version 68PGU.F20. I was going to modify it myself, but I realised it was a "ROMPAQ" bios, and I couldn't find any guides for this. The user camiloml was able to remove the whitelist for a ROMPAQ bios here: http://www.bios-mods.com/forum/Thread-Re...-Mini-2140 , so if he or someone else could at least get me started, it would really be appreciated.

If any more info is needed about my system, just ask.

Thanks in advance,

ryley

EDIT: Andy's Phonextool reports this BIOS as being an "Insyde BIOS" and as far as I can tell, its not encrypted

If anyone could provide me with any assistance, it really would be greatly appreciated. I've made absolutely no progress with this unfortunately and I'm really eager to remove this whitelist

[ryley]

I think I might have made some progress on this! Using the advice on searching for the PCI ID found here: http://forums.mydigitallife.info/archive...20223.html , I was able to find several occurences of what I think are mentions of my Broadcom WLAN card! (Card is 14e4:4353, hex string is e4145343). Also occurring several times in the same region are a few other scrambled Broadcom WLAN PCI IDs, as well as several Intel WLAN PCI IDs! I replaced all the occurences of an Intel card's ID with the ID of the Intel 6235 (I figured this was better than replacing my current cards ID). I used HxD for all of this. I saved the Rom.bin file, but now I'm not too sure how to replace the Rom.bin file in the Rom cab archive with my modified Rom.

Could someone please advise me if I'm on the right track with this, and if so, could someone please suggest how to flash this modified Rom.bin file?

[ryley]

Ok, I replaced all scrambled instances of some intel wlan cards pci id (including the subsys part) with the scrambled pci id and subsys id of my Intel 6235. I then tried using a patched version of HPQFlash that I think I got from here (4.30.2?) to flash the Rom.cab file I made with CabPack, but it failed flashing it after attempting 3 times. HPQFlash said the BIOS was corrupted, so I reinstalled my current BIOS before restarting. The HPQFlash program bundled with the BIOS's HP released late last year seems to be a fair bit newer/different (version 4.40?). The system rebooted fine, but now I'm back to where I started. I've noticed in a lot of the modded bioses on this site there are files like "3660F24.fd" in the packages and they are flashed with InsydeFlash. I tried to install my modded Rom.bin file with InsydeFlash (after changing the name in platform.ini), but InsydeFlash couldn't flash it, it just mentioned SMI and exited.

I'm willing to try anything to get this working, and if someone could help at all it would be massively appreciated.

[ryley]

After successfully patching the BIOS with ADDCC v3 to maintain the checksum after changing the whitelist and to have HPQFlash still complain, I'm out of ideas. If anyone has any ideas, I'll try anything.

ryley

[ryley]

My latest idea of using hpqflash (tried versions 4.30, 4.30-patched, 4.40 and 4.50) along with OllyDbg to interrupt the flashing process immediately after writing my modded bios, but before the verification. A few times it appeared to work, but unfortunately the unmodded bios is still in use. Still thinking of and open to new ideas!

[ryley]

So I've given up on adding the Intel 6235 to my BIOS whitelist. Instead, I'm thinking of buying an Intel 6200 Wi-Fi card. I can see several references to it's pci id in the original bios file, so does this mean the card should work? Or do some BIOS' have a whitelist as well as a blacklist? Also, should I get the card specifically targeted towards HP/Lenovo or the generic one? My BIOS contains all of the pci id's I could find for this card.

[ryley]

Hey guys, just posting to say that despite the Intel 6200 not being in my HP netbook's service manual, it's PCI ID did appear in the BIOS whitelist and it does actually work! I have a HP 5102 on the latest, unmodified BIOS. So if you aren't sure if a card will work, check if it's mentioned in the whitelist and if it is, give it a go! So happy to know have 802.11abgn in Linux with powersave and injection support!

[ryley]

I found my old HP Mini 5102 in storage the other day and remembered all the trouble I had with the BIOS, so I've been having another look at this out of curiosity. None of the patched flashers available can even flash the original BIOS image for my HP, so using IDA I've been trying to patch the good flasher myself. So far I've been able to change some parts of how the eROMPAQ.exe flasher works but I'm still unable to get it to flash a modified BIOS. When using the good eROMPAQ with a modified BIOS it attempts to "buffer" the BIOS three times before giving up. I think the function sub_10F3A (when called in sub_11A6C at loc_11BC2) is what causes my issue as when I force the jump to loc_11C16 it doesn't loop three times (but still fails to flash).

At this point I'm not too fussed about bricking the laptop, so I'm happy to try anything anyone could suggest or provide in terms of a patched eROMPAQ or even HPQFlash. The original HP BIOS package (with the only known good flasher) is available here: ftp://ftp.hp.com/pub/softpaq/sp57501-58000/sp57757.exe .

Ryley

[BDMaster]

All these HP laptop's Bioses are moddable but not reflashable so only using
and HW SPI Prorammer and a Pomona Soic Clip is possible to do this job !
Get these tools and I will help You !
Look here :

https://www.bios-mods.com/forum/Thread-R...5#pid74575

Let me know
Regards