Bios: Acer Aspire l5100

[com]

Hi,

i have a lot oft trouble with my Acer- Bios.
The virtualization is dissabled by default and no option to enable.
I tryed to update my system (newer Bios wont work, because a mainboard switch in the series), i wrote to the support and i tryed a lot of tools (most outdated).

Can anyone help me and unlock / unhide the options?

link to bios:
ftp://ftp.acer-euro.com/desktop/aspire_l5100/Bios/R01-B0.zip

Com

[karolbe]

Yes, this sucks...I also have ACER with disabled VT-x and seems like there will be no VT-x support at least now (this is what ACER support told me).

I have tried to "hack" the BIOS but I don't have enough knowledge. What I have learned so far is that the BIOS was not written directly in assembler and therefore is quite difficult to read after disassembling. What's more, I have looked into it and unfortunately there is no such obvious code fragment like this one there:

mov ecx, 0x3a
rdmsr
or eax, 0x1
wrmsr

There are similar code fragments but they set something in other MSRs (not related to Virtualization). Looks like the BIOS is quite generic because it contains strings about VT-x ("Enable/Disable Vanderpool Virtualization" etc.) in 3 or 4 different languages, so perhaps there is a flag somewhere in the code which would enable more advanced options but since the code was produced by compiler it is difficult to reverse engineer, at least for me.

The BIOS is composed of number modules which are similar to Windows EXE files (MZ...PE files), good thing is that each module contains a name, so it is easy to distinguish a module which initializes for example HDD from another one. I can write a script to extract those modules. I have tried PE Explorer on those modules but it refused to dissasemble them and none of X86 disassemblers I have was able to dissasemble them in an intelligent way (for example separate code from strings, make labels for strings instead of using hex addresses, it's a pity that there is no such disassembler like Resource I remember from Amiga days).

There are reports of successful flashes of updated Insyde BIOS so enabling VT-x is a matter of creating a patch :)

Anyone want to help?

[1234s282]

Today Is All You Peoples Lucky Day!

Im the administrator of the bios modding forum www.biosmods.com and i have looked into this bios (R01-B0 version) and am happy to report that the Virtualization option , aswell as CPU And memory overclocking options were hidden by acer. I have unlocked these features and if you want to take the risk , here is my modded bios file

http://files.getdropbox.com/u/747181/Acer%20Aspire%20L5100%20R01-B0%20With%20Overclocking%20By%201234s282.zip

I hope this works for you :D

Kindest Regards
1234s282
Administrator Of Biosmods.com

[911medic]

Hi,

i have a lot oft trouble with my Acer- Bios.
The virtualization is dissabled by default and no option to enable.
I tryed to update my system (newer Bios wont work, because a mainboard switch in the series), i wrote to the support and i tryed a lot of tools (most outdated).

Can anyone help me and unlock / unhide the options?

link to bios:
ftp://ftp.acer-euro.com/desktop/aspire_l5100/Bios/R01-B0.zip

Com

MODBIN6 is the tool you want. It will allow you to see the modules available.

It appears they are unlocked as of now..:D