(UEFI) Dell XPS 15z L511z modded BIOS - and HOWTO

[jkbuha]

All - sorry for delay on topics. Been busy on some other stuff.
I've done some background reading on apple ru and rog, specifically about CodeRush, and all I can say is... wow. If we can enlist at least some of his time on this project we will be able to unlock the remaining 10% of our hardware very quickly!

@TW - did you manage to speak with him recently?

[kasar]

@TW

well, I may sound dumb, but I didnt found it.

I think I will wait until you comeback (well, in the other hand I will be outside home during those time for xmas and family stuff, so we may have to delay the project for the 2013)

then we will continue from the point we were, wich the sockets and extra chips everything will be really easy and safe ^^

meanwhile, I just can say that being just able of turn on the machine with a self programed chip inside is awesome ^^

I admit I was starting to belive the motherboard died, but having the laptop back by the chip stuff is fantastic


@all

mmm, it seems that the admins at the other forums got mad with the donation stuff, so they deleted all the links, part of my signature, and a entire topic someone opened to try help with the ivy test proccesor payment.

they also sent me a private message warning me.

[jkbuha]

Pity mate - it wasn't like you were out to make some profit out of anything, or even exploiting their forums. Their loss, as you had contributed quite a lot of good stuff on the l502x, which you obviously won't be doing so in future.

About the ME bios - et's see what else we can hack into before we all break away for hols. Realistically there's probably about a week left before we all go away, so let's see what other magic we can do

@TW - good luck if you have any exams at the mo

[kasar]

yeah, also make profit experimentating with BIOS stuff would be really a bad business thing
it need to invest lot of time an effort, including some hardware to test ^^

they also warned me some time ago with something related rep points :O, so funny xD

well, those forums are nice, they have a nice ammount of people, but the admins ... well, there is a big room for improvement there ^^

nothing compared with this place that even the thewiz gave us custom forum titles and he greatly contributed with the Donation <3

I'm seriusly thinking about move all the guides I did from the other place to this forum, they will bring many people here probably, and it will make the admins from there think about stuff twice.

however the bad point is that it would be a mess to move a topic wich is like 130+ pages with a lot of suscriptions and links from other forums ^^

about the last week before we all go on xmas, yeah, thats right

we may can give a last push before continue this project on 2013 ^^

lets see what TW think about this ^^

[TimeWalker]

@jkbuha thanks. much! CodeRush will be available in early Jan I believe.
yeah guys, sorry for my absence. I'm reading from tapatalk in the mornings but can't reply much sadly as touch-screen keyboards are still an awkward experience for me. my end-term exams haven't even started and i'm not even finished with my assignments .. http://grab.by/iktS so this explains my lack of activity here.. and anywhere on the net actually.

[kasar]

dont worry mate, keep your time on the exams,they are important stuff, we will wait for you ^^
we can continue on january , we all will be active then, and also CodeRush come with us like you said
then we all will get the max from our machines

you can obiusly count with my l502x machine for all the testing stuff, the hardware mods plus the descriptor unlock made it very modificable I think

[kasar]

jkuha, do you still have access to the pledgie?

I think I found a cheap ivy bridge to test the ME8 firmware implementation tests ^^
last time I watched the pledgie it was also 195 €

http://www.ebay.es/itm/NEW-INTEL-i7-3720...3cca708663

I think this one is nice, it does even unlocked multiplier!

great for testing overclock unlocking mods ^^

however it is a ES edition (wich is more like a beta or prototipe version of the proccesor, but well, the price, proccesor details and unlocked multipliers are crazy stuff while most of other mobile ivy bridge proccesors are 350€ or 400€+)

[TimeWalker]

Hey all,
CodeRush chimed in today providing me this material for reading: http://wenku.baidu.com/view/55ecfbdcd15abe23482f4d75
(please don't share it widely as I've yet to gather enough Caifu Zhi to download the actual copy... and *someone* can take the file down by request in a matter of seconds).
A lot of things cleared up .. some on the other hand got more confusing. I won't have time to carefully read the document, but after skimming through it appears to have answers for most of our questions regarding ME and region permissions/structure.

[TimeWalker]

And here comes todays update .. again from CodeRush.
Pay attention to the right top corner on this page:

Then go ahead and download our 6-series chipset datasheet from Intel, which has to say the following on pp.91:


Now get your HDEF datasheet and find the following ...in a nutshell pin 5 has to be supplied voltage from pin 1 (shorted together) upon boot to trigger descriptor security override and enable debugging mode for ME:


CodeRush ended up with this:




As you can see the master lock is still intact and yet it allowed him to dump through host access..
What this means is that there's no need for a hardware flasher to gain write access to ME.
There's that for now props to the man behind this find.

[kasar]

thanks for the info!

mmm, so acording to this, bypassing the descriptor can be done with a single 1K resistor , right?

not bad, this will make things easier for you guys.
anyway, keep in mind having a flasher was the thing wich saved my laptop when it got screwed after flashing stuff from the OS with unlocked descriptor.

if I didnt had the chip backup from the flasher, I would have a brick now.

so in case you guys skip the flasher and the whole chip backup, make sure what you flash and where, the recovery cdrom can only restore the bios region, other regions are unrecoverable with the BIOS.cap trick.


note: I noticed it also said something about enable ME debugging.

as far I know I just unlocked descriptor by tweaking the flasher stuff.

do this means I still have to do the resistor trick even with modded descriptor to enable ME debugging?