Painless HP OEMBIOS and VMWare Bios Pre-Mod

Discussion in 'Windows XP / Older OS' started by MarkMan, Dec 15, 2007.

  1. MarkMan

    MarkMan MDL Novice

    Dec 10, 2007
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    If the OEMBIOS files on your copy of MCE2005 are happy with 'Hewlett-Packard' in the DMI of the BIOS, then yes it should work out just peachy for you.
     
  2. simchippy

    simchippy MDL Novice

    Oct 11, 2007
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    Will the vmware bios pre mod work on VMware Fusion with OS X? I will probably give it a shot.
     
  3. mistergman

    mistergman MDL Novice

    Jul 4, 2010
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    VMBOIS File worked on VMWARE Player 3.0.1 (build 227600)

    Simply placing VMBIOS file in HP XP PRO SP2 OS (32 bit) installed in VM and placing reference in VMX file worked great. Verified with PC Wizard 2010 which showed "Hewlett Packard" as Manufacturer. The VM was an instance of HP (SLP) fresh install with 30 days to activation. It was a clone copy of a virgin HP VM install. When VM launched first time, it complained about the new BIOS. But pressing F1 to continue resolved. Applying WGA brought install to Genuine status. Have not tried slipping in the OEMBIOS files etc. as I had an HP install ISO to begin with. Would love to learn how to edit BIOS image. Someday.
     
  4. Tito

    Tito Super Mod / Adviser
    Staff Member

    Nov 30, 2009
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  5. gumboe

    gumboe MDL Novice

    Jan 2, 2011
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    #25 gumboe, Jan 2, 2011
    Last edited: Jan 2, 2011
    I know it's been a long time but I've only recently gone through all this, many thanks to MarkMan for his howto at the beginning of this post - he really did save me a lot of time. Anyway since going through this for VMWare I've since also done the same for Oracle's Virtualbox. These are just my notes that I've coped and pasted here for my benefit as well as for anyone elses - the first part goes over what MarkMan covered at the beginning of this thread.

    I downloaded Windows XP sp3 and xables updates and integrated them using nlite.
    I then copied the HP oem bios files which MarkMan provided and my winnt.sif and setupp.ini files into my i386 folder and then went back into nlite and created a bootable iso.
    Using the instructions from MarkMans post I then created a VMWare virtual machine profile and then editted this profile (C:\Documents and Settings\Administrator\My Documents\My Virtual Machines\test\test.vmx) with notepad so that it contained the following line - it doesnt seem to make any difference where this goes, I just stuck it at the end of the file and made sure there was a blank line at the end of the file.

    bios440.filename = "VMBIOS_HP.ROM"

    I then started the VM and windows installed all unattended (I'd previously also created a winnt.sif file and used my oem setupp.ini file)
    After the install I checked that it was activated by clicking on start/run and entered oobe/msoobe /a and got a window back stating that windows was already activated.
    I then thought I'd have a go at installing the latest xbmc iso into this vm and a couple of googles showed that this wasn't possible as there's no hardware acceleration in VMware or in MS Virtual PC so it looked like I was going to have to give Virtualbox a go.

    Downloaded and installed Virtualbox from Oracle.

    Download CrystalDMI and run it. It lists lots of information which is used to populate the five lines at the end of this post for YOUR Virtual Machine.

    My virtual machine is called "windows XP with XBMC"

    I knew that I'd have to do the equivalent for Virtualbox with the DMI settings so went googling that. It wasn't entirely obvious how to do it but then I had an idea that perhaps Virtualbox's own help would shed some light - it did. The command to use is the VBoxManage command, which is located where you installed Virtualbox (this is obvious with hindsight but wasn't mentioned in the help page). So change directory to the location of the VBoxManage executable and armed with the info from output of CrystalDMI and hey presto I've knocked up the updated entries to make this virtual machine think it was running on HP hardware so that the oembios files would work correctly and I would have an oem activated copy of windows. This might seem like kids play to some of you but it was a big deal for me so I thought I'd pass on what I did.

    I don't know if a shorter list of commands would have worked but I put these 5 lines in and it worked for me. Time to figure this out and test for Virtualbox was about an hour.


    cd "C:\Program Files\Oracle\VirtualBox"

    C:\Program Files\Oracle\VirtualBox>VBoxManage setextradata "Windows XP with XBMC" "VBoxInternal/Devices/pcbios/0/Config/DmiBIOSVendor" "Hewlett-Packard"

    C:\Program Files\Oracle\VirtualBox>VBoxManage setextradata "Windows XP with XBMC" "VBoxInternal/Devices/pcbios/0/Config/DmiBIOSVersion" "686O4 v1.15"

    C:\Program Files\Oracle\VirtualBox>VBoxManage setextradata "Windows XP with XBMC" "VBoxInternal/Devices/pcbios/0/Config/DmiSystemVendor" "Hewlett-Packard"

    C:\Program Files\Oracle\VirtualBox>VBoxManage setextradata "Windows XP with XBMC" "VBoxInternal/Devices/pcbios/0/Config/DmiSystemProduct" "hp workstation xw6000"

    C:\Program Files\Oracle\VirtualBox>VBoxManage setextradata "Windows XP with XBMC" "VBoxInternal/Devices/pcbios/0/Config/DmiSystemVersion" "Hewlett-Packard"



    This all worked for me, however I don't make any promises that it'll work for you, if you have any problems though - don't give up, the answers are there waiting to be Googled - be persistent.