Compaq F730US Whitelist bypass HOWTO

Discussion in 'Windows XP / Older OS' started by Daemoen, May 19, 2008.

  1. Daemoen

    Daemoen MDL Novice

    Nov 28, 2007
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    First off, I take no responsibility for any damage to your system because you do not understand what you are doing. Other than that, follow this and you should be good to go.

    Tools you will need: Latest bios update from HP F.1C (12/07)
    Phoenix Bios Editor 2.2 (not too hard to find)
    A good Hex editor. I used HxD


    Steps:

    1.) Unpack the bios exe or simply run it, but do NOT flash your bios!!!!!! You just want the .wph file.

    2.) Using PBE, open up 30D3F1F.WPH, and just browse around for a bit (ignore the module issues, these are NOT critical)

    3.) Using your hex editor, open up C:\program files\Phoenix....\TEMP\BIOSCOD1.ROM and search for offset EC3, this is where the whitelist begins.

    In the F730 US, the offset does NOT have a crc check, so you are ok there. The whitelist ranges from offset EC3 to F4A minimally. I did not look up all the other PCI ID strings for vendors, that block alone is fairly large and gives you enough space to put in at least 6 cards.

    Anyways, the PCI IDs are in little endian format, so using broadcom 4311 as an example, we have the vendor id 14E4. In the hex, it is represented by E4 14, following by 11 43 <- device id. Notice that the numbers are "quasi" backward. You will need to make sure you do this with your new pci information.

    The fastest way to get the information for your card is to look at the driver disk and open up the .sys file in notepad or some other utility. It has to register the information with windows, so get the PCI Vendor, Device ID, and Subsystem Id from the .sys file. Once you have that, transform the information into little endian (the "quasi backward" format) and replace one of the broadcom strings. If done correctly, you will be replacing 16 characters in the hex table.

    Save the bioscod1.rom, then jump back to PBE.

    In PBE, open up the strings, and look for something that is simple and easy to change. Like the "Exit" option for exiting the bios. I changed mine to "byebye". Once done, press ctrl-u and make sure there are NO errors. Once it is rebuilt, use swinphlash to flash your new modded .wph file into your bios. Enjoy your whitelist modded bios.


    A very very very important note: The flashing utility seems to do a date/version check, this is why you must NOT flash your bios before starting, once you do, you are commited to it. I am still currently working on a way around this myself as I didn't know about it. I will write up a more thorough picture guided walkthrough later, just have to get the bios loaded into my system as I ran a test entry....