The ASUS one I may have uploaded the wrong one, as for the DELL I had a different DELL SLIC that was one character longer and was from a server. I forgot to change the last byte not realizing it was shorter. If I had tested it I may of figured it out. UPDATE: They should be fixed now, I updated the links.
@TheOneAndOnly These are probably some silly questions: Why are you trying to activate a server 2008? Is there SLP2.0 licensing at all? I think I've missed something. What exactly is your goal? Or do you want to activate Vista in a virtual environment? Btw: I had a look at the 13500.rom bios again.....at the moment no idea......
A thought just crossed my mind. I know some applications, before executing another file, checks the hash (CRC/MD5/SHA1) of that particular file before executing for possible tampering. Would this be the case with vmwp.exe? How about generating a hash for vmwp.exe and then search for this string in some config file or something? If located, replace it with a new hash generated for a modified vmwp.exe. Just a thought.
IMO it's a bios issue, because there is no error message....Restorator should be able to correct all what's needed...... I guess there is no seperate biosfile located somewhere after the installation of Hyper V, right? Or another way to integrate a bios like vmware? Winhex is able to show / edit allocated RAM. Open RAM, search for vmwp.exe and open its allocated RAM. Can you locate / save the bios? What happens if you edit the SLIC or even write a complete modded bios into RAM (same place as original) and reboot vm......
@ Yen It seems like writing to memory thats not your own applications allocation would be protected, especially in a server environment, but I can give it a try. @ reginakampher I like the idea, but I need a tool that watches what all happens when a cretin process is launched, in this case vmwp.exe. I know it's out there but can't think of what it was called.
Well, I attempted to read the whole 8GB memory contents of Win2k8 but I just get a message "PAGEUNREADABLE" over and over. I can read the contents of the separate programs in memory so I launched vmwp.exe and was able to figure out which one it was. I did find the SLIC table but when I change it in memory and restart the virtual machine, windows xp, and use ACPI Scope or Everest its the same as before. So it seems that it's getting cached somewhere once a virtual machine is launched.
There are multiple instances of the code (SLIC) found at physical memory, you have to find the right one. The sequences are repeating. It's usually the second instance. You can also uncheck include free regions to skip unreadable areas.......... OK, we have to get progress. About the reliability of Restorator or other tools like that. Does it work at wmware.exe when you replace the bios? Never tried that, because I used the config file to embed it. Unfortunately I don't have any vm installed....... If yes we can say it's reliable. I guess it's a checksum which the bios checks for...... at least I hope it's only that. I'll try another mod, same 8bit checksum as original and if I get it with same 16 bit as well to try........ It cannot be that difficult to mod it (I hope so..... ) An interesting experiment is also just to change one byte of bios, lets say SLIC to SLEC and try if it still works. IMO it shouldn't..... (new checksum!)
I have successfully used Restorator to insert the modded BIOS back into VMware.exe. I also have used it successfully in reinserting the modded BIOS for VPC 2007. So, I would deem it reliable.