Q: Modding DELL GX280 bios?

[swartz]

Got a few Dell GX280 desktop computers used as test environment. I use free VMware ESXi server on them to test various pieces of software/OSs.

The annoying part is that ESXi keeps displaying error message that allude to CPUIDLimit is being limited. And recommends to disable this feature in BIOS. However Dell bios has no such settings.

Is there a way to add this setting?

Here's the latest bios from Dell:
ftp://ftp.us.dell.com/bios/GX280A08.EXE


Also these machines support upto 4Gb (4x 1Gb) of RAM (according to DELL), which they are equipped with. However none of the OSs I've tried, including Win XP/Vista 32bit (with and without PAE), XP/Vista x64, Ubuntu 32bit/x64 can see all 4gb. Regardless of what OS tried, they only see 3.1Gb of it. BIOS reports that it sees full 4GB.

After doing some research, Memory Hole (aka memory remap, memory hoist) setting may need to be enabled to let them OS's see the memory above 4gb. However, Dell BIOS once again does not have this option.

Can this also be added?

I've tried playing with modbin. However Dell does not provide .bin of their BIOS. I've tried extracting the .rom file from the above exe via
GX280A08.EXE -writeromfile

But modbin can't open it saying it isn't version 6.0.

Is there a way to back up current GX280 bios? From DOS?

Any suggestions would be most welcome!

[ifeife2]

You're running some enterprise VMWare ESX emulation software but I guess you want to MOD your real bios to trick the licensing on the virtual machines. So I guess this applies to the virtualization topic.

If you search the forum for posts by Yen, he mentions BIOS dumping pretty often. I don't recall what tools he recommends.

[swartz]

You're running some enterprise VMWare ESX emulation software but I guess you want to MOD your real bios to trick the licensing on the virtual machines. So I guess this applies to the virtualization topic.

If you search the forum for posts by Yen, he mentions BIOS dumping pretty often. I don't recall what tools he recommends.

You got me completely wrong.

VMware ESXi is the free version of ESX server.
I'm not trying to emulate any licenses. This is not SLIC mod or anything like that.

I'm trying to add a switch to BIOS (to merely flip a register) to disable the CPUID Limit (google it if you dont know what it is).

Otherwise the ESXi server complains that the computer is incompatible. It does not like limited CPUID setting of BIOS, which I cannot change with stock DELL bios.

[ifeife2]

Ok sorry for the confusion. Yea, I didn't know there was a free ESX server. And I didn't know what the CPUID limitation is also : )

I have read on these forums that Dell bios's are protected from being flashed. That's kind of bad news. Hopefully you have a machine that is vulnerable to a workaround or some loader to flip that switch in memory before booting the server, hehe.

Edit: Now that I think about it, it may be just easier for some hacker to patch VMWare than patching a protected BIOS.

[sebus]

swartz, I do not think it is likely

ifeife2, you have it all wrong, it must be the host BIOS, not VM BIOS

sebus