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

[kasar]

wow, what a rush

where did you bough the chip?

what is the size of your new chip?

what model did you choose?

I want to join too

also, if we test with a similar hardware configuration, the chances of success by sharing the information will be higher

[follow_me]

wow, what a rush

where did you bough the chip?

what is the size of your new chip?

what model did you choose?

I want to join too

also, if we test with a similar hardware configuration, the chances of success by sharing the information will be higher

I bought it from ebay
http://www.ebay.com/itm/251150634753

W25Q64BVSIG - 64Mbit (8MB) - I bought this one because of 2 reasons
1 - It is from the same vendor and has series we have, just double-sized (just 2 times more cells), which means it can be used as one we have , at worst case, we will have to update drivers with new device Id

2 - FITS has a profile for it , so it wold be easy to modify base part of firmware

[kasar]

thanks for the info and link

I will get some of those in a few days.

so now we basically are doubling, multipliing by two the firmware flash capability with those, huh?

if we manage to get this working with bigger ME images, this may really interesting

did your chips aready arrived?

(I still waiting my i5 cpu package, spent all my money on it, so I will need to wait a little to get the chips)

also I will probably try getting 4 of them.

from the 5 winbond chips I got, two of them are already broken, 1 of them is burned/damaged, and the other one have broken legs.

so it will be nice to have extra ones in case things goes wrong.

well, I think the descriptor also had some info about the chips, not sure, so it may require some fitc editing too.

[follow_me]

did your chips aready arrived?

Not yet, have to wait week or two

You can open your dump in FITC and take a look what other settings you have, as far as I remember , there is settings for region offsets and sizes, chip Id's , and thats all

[kasar]

I will start looking for it, anyway your chips will arrive before mine, so you will be the first one to have them to test

mmm, do you have already a external programmer to program the new chips?

did you planned to install sockets?

I think this will probably need several testings, so if you have to desolder and solder stuff everytime you flash something externally, that will have high chances to damage the motherboard, the chips can be easly replaced if you have dumps of the chip, but as for the motherboard ... well, it is a different history, and way more expensive (I saw my L502X motherboard on ebay for like 250$! not specially cheap ^^)

also, while porting the whole firmware to the new chip (suposed we modified the ids, offsets, and sizes) what we will program on the new chip with the programmer at the first time?


I meam, we will have to expand the 4 mb backup with FF or zeroes to fit a 8 mb image (my external programer software refused allways to flash a non exact image size of the chip or to flash just partial zones, it allways wanted a complete flash), and also probably will need to place the specific parts of the firmware in specific zones

so the machine will be able to boot after the flash transplant/upgreade.


edit:

what about this one?

http://www.ebay.com/itm/New-WINBOND-IC-C...46156955bc

this one store up to 16 MB will never have probably firmware space issues. hehe

[Florin9doi]

as for the moment I know two types of ME firmware versions, the 1,5 mb package versions, and the 5 mb package versions.

the small ones are usually focused to laptops, meanwhile the bigger ones are usually for desktop machines wich offer hybrid functions between for example ME 7.x and 8.x versions (sandy + bridge support)

Not really. 5mb is used by Q/QM series chipsets which have AMT/vPro.

[kasar]

oh, I see, then if we get the 5Mb firmware working, it may brings the unlocked ATM menu (currently not works, reboot the machine)

thx for the fix florin

[follow_me]

what about this one?

http://www.ebay.com/itm/New-WINBOND-IC-C...46156955bc

this one store up to 16 MB will never have probably firmware space issues. hehe

Interesting one , I've ordered couple of this too

[kasar]

haha, I wish I had a wallet like yours

[jkbuha]

...and we're back.

After a lot of faffing about, involving a desoldering of the bios chip, and ruining one of the legs and lifting up the PCB pads with the soldering iron in the process I've thrown in the towel, reordered a replacement mobo and put everything back in place; mods, pimped ME firmware and all. Even though the heart-surgery was not a success a lot of interesting things have been learnt/raised in the process, for instance:

1) Is it possible to actually replace the lifted PCB pads back under the BIOS chip?
2) The L511z solders the CPU to the board, so it's not that easy to remove/replace the CPU, which is a shame as I have my eyes on a nice faster quad proc running at the same wattage. Has anyone ever managed to desolder the CPU?
3) There are some (very) subtle differences between the L511z variants. It isn't even possible to flash the EEPROM dump from the L511z with motherboard revisions E0 and E1, even with the same CPU.

4) This one is quite an eye-opener. On dual-boot systems, you can set the FSB to 105MHz, and reboot into OSX with the FSB settings persist. *However* this can only be done in UEFI mode on OSX - Chameleon freezes at boot. Which raises an interesting question; has anyone fully experimented with modifying FSB settings in Windows UEFI mode?

Any updates on the 5MB firmware hacking?