LENOVO (IBM) Bioses, especially Thinkpad. Previous requests

The most important thing was your confirmation that it worked. I have to thank you again for trying the mod, I appreciate. (You’ve taken the risk to get a bricked Notebook)

This was an example of a 4 MByte bios and I had to change the OEMTABLEID as well.

Both operations are not described clearly at the original Chinese source.
I had to understand the complete approach plus to complete the instructions.
I know now much more about the structure of Phoenix bios.
The author of the original isn’t reachable.

Your confirmation means, that the whole approach leads to a successfully introduction of SLIC.
This cannot happen just by accident! Your (the first) result is always very useful and important.
So you can say one time success, every time a success?
Almost yes!

If a Phoenix bios flash goes wrong anyway, it could be because of following 3 reasons:

-The modder did a mistake (Obviously I didn’t at yours)
-The flash process went wrong (Phoenix bioses are sometimes picky to flash)
-PBE doesn’t rebuild the bios properly (Doesn’t matter at the Lenovo Way.)

To minimise this risks I double check the mod and provide the winphlash tool with the right settings additionally.

Most of the bad Phoenix flashes are happening because of the flashtool. A too old version (A higher version number DOESN’T mean a newer version) or hidden advanced settings and hence wrong or insufficient settings.

I'm sure we will collect more results!

 

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Any idea what caused that issue?
A program that interferes with PBE??

 

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Genaral statement:

The results make this clear:

ALL Lenovo / Thinkpad bioses which are modified by using PBE caused a bricked board!!

I did 2 so far, all bricked!

The ones I did manually without to rebuild it with PBE are working!

I will here NEVER USE PBE again!!!


@tochill: Your result makes me feel sad. And I thank you for trying it anyway. It led to progress, the fact that PBE destroys the structure. I guessed that there is something wrong with PBE already! But I was not sure. Petar confirmed a decompression issue with PBE yesterday as well.

But what are tools for? To relieve work! If I had known this before, I had removed the link to the bios mod immediately.
I will mark now the mods NOT to use!!

I hope you’ll find a way to recover. At least I hope you don’t have much trouble till it works again. Now I know a manually mod will work. I don’t know if you ever want to try a mod again


To all: USE THE LENOVO WAY! AT EVERY THINKPAD BIOS. NEVER MORE PBE!!

 

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I assume the softmod uses the ASUS certificate for activation. So there was no problem at ASUS K8V Deluxe bios mod.

Now we have a Lenovo mod! That's the difference. You have to apply the Lenovo cert. (after you have done the -rilc command) from the archive. Key for ultimate is the same. (ends with -932CC)

Anyway the *.ATS report will make clear if the mod is working or not.

 

@ the-paperboy

Thank you for your support. I’m still sad about and a bit angry that PBE sucks this way. I’ve read at some other forums that PBE causes problems as well. Most of the ‘experts’ don’t trust it.

I’m pretty sure that almost all Phoenix bios mods which caused a bricked board were screwed up by PBE……

If I will do any Phoenix bios mod again, no matter what OEM, I’ll decide to try it completely manually first. This will be more time consuming, but much more safe.
Winphlash 1.6.6.3c with the settings used here seems to be a reliable flash tool, Vista 32 bit or XP, no matter. I also suggest to use this version.

@Turbo1dr

Glad to hear that it worked.

The ‘lenovo way’ or manually way is confirmed. The Chinese did it, my version seems to work as well. I was forced to use the Lenovo way, because PBE wasn’t able to rebuild your bios (error message). So far so good.

At tochill’s and rients’ bios PBE didn’t complain about at rebuild. So you were the lucky one, tochill and rients unfortunately not, since the common way using PBE failed!!!


Now to your questions.

Paradox softmod emulates a SLIC (SoftwareLicenseInternalCode). SLIC is usually handled like a ACPI table and provided from bios.

At activation you have to apply a certificate, which is a xml code and a key. Both together activate against the SLIC.

Softmod: SLIC, cert. and key are software-based. Paradox uses the same certificates and keys as official OEM’s.

Official SLP2.0 license: SLIC is hardcoded at bios, cert. and key are software-based.

SP1 disables the way of SLIC-emulation used by Paradox. So you will loose the activation!
The cert. and key stay applied. If you now flash a bios mod, you’ll get a new SLIC.
If the SLIC matches to the already installed cert., Vista becomes activate again. (ASUS bios)

At Lenovo bios mod you have to re-apply another cert. for activation.

Both are now real biosmods and activated like OEM bios. I assume that the Paradox code / driver still loads somewhere but has no effect, it’s ballast only.

Short:
1. Yes
2. No.
There are other softmods as well. They interfere with a biosmod and you will get real problems at activation. I suggest to all to remove the softmods (emulated software SLIC’s) before to avoid any issue or confusion.

@petar:

Thanks for the info. I'll analyse the PBE issue as well. And I'm trying to make a complete manually mod of another OEM, by modifiying the RSDT and XSDT at BIOSCOD1.ROM and by inserting a new ACPI module. To modify the OEMID'S directly at lenovo's RSDT isn't necessary since the bioscode reads it from the BIOSCOD3 module at once.

 

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