[SOLVED] HP Pavilion ZD8000 BIOS RAM Limit?

[DeathBringer]

I also added my patched bioscod3.rom to this BIOS and it works great with that; I installed an Atheros AR5008X Mini-PCI wireless card that runs much better than the 802.11g broadcom """MaxPerformance""" HP OEM card.

Make new screenshot of Device Manager.

Would it be possible to go any higher on the 256MB model?

I compared your screenshot and LoneCrusader's one.
ATI MOBILITY RADEON X600 used different regions. And in your case D0000000-DFFFFFFF (256 KB) is free!
Can you restore BIOS in bad cases?
Please make and post TXT report of CPU-Z.

[k24a1]

I also added my patched bioscod3.rom to this BIOS and it works great with that; I installed an Atheros AR5008X Mini-PCI wireless card that runs much better than the 802.11g broadcom """MaxPerformance""" HP OEM card.

Make new screenshot of Device Manager.

Would it be possible to go any higher on the 256MB model?

I compared your screenshot and LoneCrusader's one.
ATI MOBILITY RADEON X600 used different regions. And in your case D0000000-DFFFFFFF (256 KB) is free!
Can you restore BIOS in bad cases?
Please make and post TXT report of CPU-Z.

Here ya go.
I also attached the ROM file for my noWL-patched BIOS in case you wanna use that as a base, where only bioscod3 was modified by me to bypass the (very pesky) whitelist.
Also, yes, this computer does indeed have a BIOS recovery method, Phoenix Crisis.

[DeathBringer]

Thx!
Can you uninstall all graphics drivers and make new screenshot of Device Manager?

[k24a1]

Thx!
Can you uninstall all graphics drivers and make new screenshot of Device Manager?

   

[DeathBringer]

Thanks for your information for future research!

[k24a1]

Thanks for your information for future research!

You're very welcome! Let me know about any findings and modifications. The zd8000 has always been an interesting machine to me and I'm very happy to take part in doing research too. I wonder how feasible it would be to re-arrange the PCI memory ranges so as to allow for up to ~3400MB or ~3.37GB of memory on these (this could've taken 4 easily, but the i915's memory bus isn't 64-bit), though unfortunately there is only so much you can do with proprietary software like this. :/

I am somewhat knowledgeable in the field of modifying older BIOSes but sadly a lot of that information is either gone or was never shared back in the day (to which I could understand why as OEMs could easily crack down on this stuff during that time). I am also good with hardware stuff so yeah, I'm now aspiring to mod BIOSes myself... haha. There's actually an unused SATA provision on the board where you could solder a port to, but the BIOS has it disabled somewhere in the actual code, likely the menus have it hidden and disabled by default, but "Serial ATA" references are present in the BIOS for the zd8000 if you look around with a hex editor.

Very happy to be a part of this community