i've been trying to flash some of the roms (for the aspire 4720 and 8730) and i can't seem to flash the *.rom files, even in dos. WPH files flash fine. What method are you all using? I even went so far as to do my own (without errors in PBE) and i keep getting various errors trying various methods. Thanks.
I can mod 4720 just fine, do you still need it ? As for 8730 SLIC start @ 0x4FBE5 on .wph, you can just edit it directly and re-calc the checksum. There is no duplicated RSA1, so it will not be hard to do so.
hi Gradius. Im familiar with hex coding a bit (such as the PBE temp dir and hexing various files within the wph), and understand how and what im supposed to do, but i cant open either wph from the Acer website with PBE (only roms, wich i can't flash). As far as Hex editing a WHP im just not comfortable enough in Hex to confidently do something as important as my bios for a first attempt. I've done my 4 DFI desktops (Award bios) with the Acer 2.1 "ANNI" slic and Acer SLP but ironically can't mod the Acer machines with an Acer Slic lol. So, as far as your offer, i would love it if you could post one or both of the bio's already done in WPH form with a flasher you know will accept the files, or a step in the right direction. It seems like you already are familiar with both and seem to know what has to be done. If you do, i will at least open them in Hex and try to reverse engineer what you did for a learning experience.
Hi, Yes, I know you cannot open it with PBE, I tried myself before, it seems PBE is limited to 2048Kb max, this is why we cannot open any bigger file. I don't know the checksum for Phoenix, I'll need to a research a bit, but I read it is necessary to do a checksum for SLIC as well, that part I'm not 100% sure.
I forgot to post the log: Code: VOLUME USAGE SUMMARY ================= Num Name Used Bytes Free Bytes --- ----------------- -------------------- ------------------- 00. ROM1 899987 (0xDBB93) 476269 (0x7446D) 01. PRIMARY 996 (0x3E4) 261148 (0x3FC1C) 02. BOOTBLOCK 118002 (0x1CCF2) 13070 (0x330E) ROM USAGE SUMMARY ================= Total Gap Count : 25 gaps Total Gap Size : 750487 (0xB7397) bytes Largest Gap Size : 474905 (0x73F19) bytes Average Gap Size : 30019 (0x7543) bytes Total File Count : 151 files Total File Size : 1346665 (0x148C69) bytes Largest File Size : 131072 (0x20000) bytes Average File Size : 8918 (0x22D6) bytes 0 Error/0 Warning.
hi Gradius. Thanks for the 8730 bios, it worked great. You said you tricked the bios and im a sucker for trickery so i tried it. I had flashed my bios with a Lenovo slic originally and when i was trying to flash the bios it always had the Lenovo slic still (in RW everything). After reflashing various wph it finally ocurred to me it was my R&D laptop and sure enough, i had a friggin "invisible" 7loader on my boot partition that i was testing a PAE (for non household) install of Win7 with. Grrr and duh. Your mod worked perfectly anyways and if you could rig the Acer 4720 the same way it would be greatly appreciated because whatever trickery you did to this one worked great. Oh, and is there any known way to not use a floppy on the crisis disk? Like a virtual floppy to an image? Floppies are dinosaurs and a pain to have to use on the fly compared to SD and USB (ie: Ultraiso 9.3, write image to device).
Thanks, the bios works great. Im starting to feel like im my own OEM now lol. Shame about the floppies, but it makes sense. I usually only see raid drivers on them anymore.
Sure no problem. About floppies, I'm sure they will use USB key/pen drive in near future, those things are already the new standard. Perhaps now in 2010, they decide to include USB key/pen on bootloader BIOS code.
Well I flashed the bios without any problems but having trouble installing the certificate to activate windows. I tried both the manual method of installing it and using the opatool and in both cases I see the message telling me it installed successfully but when I check it with the slic dump tool, it says that the certificate is missing. Im using the acer certificate and im trying to activate on a clean install of windows 7 ultimate. Any ideas why its not working?