[Request] Asus A8JR BIOS - unlock hidden menu entries

[jommoner]

Hi!

I have an A8JR, and need to get the BIOS menu to let me set the SATA to AHCI mode. I have checked all the BIOSes from ASUS, and none have that option.

The system is almost identical to the A8JS (in fact, it is identical now as I have upgraded the CPU to the one from my broken A8JS, and upgraded to a 1GB GPU card as well). The motherboard sped up to 667MHz FSB and everything works fine.

None of the Asus A8JS BIOSes have a menu entry for SATA / AHCI either.

Looking at the A8JR (and A8JS) BIOSes in AMIBCP, there is no menu entry to 'unlock' there; there are however two 'spacers' in a row, suggesting that something was deleted.

I found a thread on another forum where someone with an A8JS called Tech Support, and the A8JS they had in front of them had the SATA / AHCI option! (obviously they never released this to the public).

What has happened is: they made a BIOS with the SATA / AHCI config options (it uses the ICH7-M chipset so does support AHCI), but after compilation of the BIOS, they used the AMIBCP tool to delete the menu entries from the 'tree' for the IDE configuration and SATA configuration.

I would be really grateful for some help on getting these menu entries back!

(I did the test where you type:
setpci -s 00:1f.2 90.b=40 from a linux terminal (live USB), and the
register value changed from 02 (IIRC) to 40, and some extra stuff
came up when doing lspci -s 00:1f.2 -nnvvxxx) - so the hardware support is there, and the BIOS must have been compiled with the options in the menu, but then deleted from the BIOS menu (not the internal 'menu tree?' using AMIBCP by Asus before releasing the BIOS to the public.

Thanks for your help

PS I attach the raw AMI BIOS from the ASUS site - I can mod the VGA option rom afterwards once I know the Menus for IDE and SATA config are reinserted!

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PS This is a BIOS from the F8v - a very similar machine, and you can see, in AMIBCP,
the entry for SATA mode; the A8JR BIOS had this, but now has two 'Separators' one after the other - showing something was deleted from between them (in AMIBCP presumably!).

[jommoner]

Have experimented with the ASUS F8v BIOS - because this computer is very similar to the A8Jr, but has the SATA option in the menu.
AMIBCP wouldn't let me delete the entry for SATA so I instead changed it from user -> Reserved.

I then extracted the Single Link Arch BIOS files from the original and modified BIOSes and found the following things:

SLABS differ at locations 0xEFFF0, 0x20000, 0x20010, FFF50 and FFFE9 - even if you just save two in a row.
These locations therefore seem to be related to the time of creation, and some to the version of AMIBCP.

When changing a single flag as above (user -> reserved)...

The SLABs differ at location 0x0003C39B -> 0x00056A7B. Interestingly, there are some areas where there are
long runs of the same repeating character - around 55E70 and 56A30.

The SLABs match up again (although offset) from address 58B28 (original SLAB) which matches 56A7C (modified SLAB).

The areas of repeating characters - e.g. at 55E70, suggest that the SLAB isn't compressed (they are extracted uncompressed in MMTool), but that there is some kind of encryption or something?

I attach the two SLABs below, as well as the F8 bios for reference:

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SLABs (.rom extension added to allow upload)