i did.. no work... tried 2.1.3, 3.0.0.1 vista loaders, vista paradox, wow 2.00 hp, Windows.Vista.Activator.2007 and many more.. please.. help!
OK, I'll release a test version, based on the renaming method at this thread later this day to gather more info. @FTO Unfortunately your bios VERSION: F.10 isn't modifiable
Your kind of bios isn't modifiable since we don't have the right tools to edit it. To update your bios doesn't change anything regarding to activate Vista. Only chance is to find a working softmod. A good source is / was vistafans.com. Unfortunately it's a Chinese site. Gkend wrote softmods as well. I assume Paradox is the only working one, but was disabled after SP1.
Yen: I can tell WOW to patch MCFG at RSDT for FTO with ACPI 1.0 bios. Is that advisable? Of course this will deactivate MCFG. Edit: I think I will focus on extending XSDT table as planned and if its ACPI 1.0 with only RSDT then extend that as in FTO case. Stay tuned...
At first Award biosmods we've replaced MCFG table with SLIC. I never heard about issues but you have to watch out for PCI express related hardware and power management since MCFG is PCI Express memory mapped configuration space base address Description Table... As last resort yes. But to extend the XSDT or RSDT is the most perfect solution.
Too bad I cannot test anything. My HDD of my Vista test installation has died....... Thanks again for your hard work.
Here is vmware 6.0 ACPI report you can look at. My own build of WOW does work with VMWARE but it has hardcoded address to patch FADT so it points to relocated DSDT. P.S. Sorry about your HD. I know the feeling.
Thanks again. No worry about the HDD, since it's a test machine, I haven't lost any personal data.....but no Vista right now.... Hope petar will test soon...
One question: flagmax, do you use the space right after RSDT/XSDT to add a new entry to SLIC OR do you move the table that follows RSDT / XSDT additionally?
I search for 176h zeros infront of RSDT and plant the SLIC there, then search for enough space for "some" table after XSDT or RSDT infront of SLIC and move "some" table there. I then patch the pointer to "some" table and extend XSDT by 8 for SLIC pointer or RSDT by 4.
This is great! I had a look at some dumps again. I've seen that at all dumps (real bioses) right after the RSDT table there are four bytes left before the next table follows. I'm wondering about if this is coincidental..... Btw: Sent a PM to moderator to change thread title: No activation possible, no softmod solution, no biosmod, what now?
Yah I noticed 4 bytes of 00's right after RSDT and between XSDT in petar's mem dump. Not sure if this is always the case with ACPI 2.0 or not. This is not the case with VMWARE and my own PC bios both are ACPI 1.0. As long as OS don't touch the space I allocate for "some" table and SLIC, we should be ok. After POST, there is nothing but zeros in that space. My code searches from RSDT-1MB to RSDT.
Yen: I have looked at new VMWARE 6.5 and so far I couldn't activate it with WOW. This bios has the XSDT table first then RSDT table right after it. I tried to extend the RSDT table and SLIC shows up but vista doesn't activate. My guess is ACPI 2.0 must have SLIC in XSDT. But RSDT is in the way and cannot be moved because of RSD PTR linked to it. Do you have any ideas?