BIOS tweaker/unlocker

Does anybody know of any programs via which you can tweak or unlock hidden BIOS settings? Something like TweakBIOS (TweakBIOS is very old)? Need this for an Acer Aspire 3023 with Phoenix BIOS. The reason is that the current BIOS does not let you make any important changes to the laptop.

 

I'm not familiar with Acers but notebooks in general do not have rich-in-options BIOSes, nor do they have unlocking options.
I'll be happy if proven wrong...

 

Most of my posts on the forum ask this same question. Do a search for them and you'll see the roadblocks I encountered. I am very upset about Acer's lack of support on the "skimpy BIOS" issue. They hide behind the "Uncle Bill doesn't want us to give you those options" reason. If you find an unlocker, please,please notify me. I went so far as to consider hacking the BIOS itself.

Talon

 

Hi there Talon_Sr!
I did some google-ing and came across the program Phoenix Bios Editor Pro. It seems to be the official tool from Phoienix. However, when I try to load an Acer Phoenix BIOS image I get an error message, saying (something) like file too short.
There seems to be someone, a guy called Borg Number One, and he seems to have 'compiled' a package called BNOBTC (Borg Number One Bios Tools Collection). Unfortunately he stopped public access to this collection. Have sent him a request, via e-mail, but he never answered me back. Here he is amswering to someone who seems to have sent him 'support' .
Anyway, there is a link to a chinese site which seems interesting, but, I really do NOT know chinese, and surfing that site is pure mayhem. Maybe you have a chinese friend who could help us out by reading some stuff from that site and letting us know if there is anything worth of interest?

OT: with regard to your answer here, I think that you may be mistaken. There are some tools around that enable you to oc a system directly from Windows, without the need to enter the BIOS. Take a peek at this thread. Normally you could use ClockGen to raise the FSB. But you DO need to know the exact PLL that you have on your mainboard. And also, you can OC you video adapter using different tweakers specifically for your GPU.

 

Nicolin, thanx for the suggestions. I'm not really interested in overclocking my notebook. What I want to do is be able to boot from a USB fash drive. Oddly enough, the BIOS gives you four USB choices to boot from and ONLY the USB HDD choice will work. My 5672 will not read ANY USB Keys, flash drives, or other USB devices. I have a Corsair 1GB Voyager flash key and it is useless with this impotent BIOS.

Talon

 

What BIOS version do you have? What operating system are you trying to boot from on the USB drive?

 

risslerp, I have 3224 currently but have also tried it with the 3219 that it originally had loaded. Next question: You name it, I've tried to load it. SLAX, KillBill, WXP, Knoppix, etc. The pre-installed environments are not to blame, because they never even get a chance to fail since the BIOS will not read my USB key. Sure I can boot these PEs from the DVD, but **** it, I want the USB options to work as well if for nothing more than the portability the USB key gives me.

Talon

 

I was able to boot DOS up from 2 different USB Flash Keys/Drives. The first was a Lexar Jump Drive 1GB and the second was a SanDisk U3 Cruzer Micro 2GB. For both drives the BIOS recognized them as a USB HDD.

USB HDD: LEXAR JUMPDRIVE SECURE
USB HDD: SanDisk U3 Cruzer Micro

I did not test both at the same time but I'm tempted to see what happens.
OK, I just put both in at the same time. They both turn up as USB HDD: Just like stated above. If you move the keys to different usb slots, they'll rearrange themselves. I guess you can determine the order of the usb slots this way.

This was done on an Acer Aspire 5670 (the older one with the x1400 graphics) and BIOS 3224.

I would try different USB keys.

 

Thanks for the info risslerp. I will try one of those keys.

Talon

 

Btw risslerp, have you tried the U3 software on that Sandisk flash drive? Did it work or have you had bad experiences like those I've been reading about?

Talon

 

I must say I did not like the software. It autoruns every time you plug in the drive. It does give you an option to reformat the drive as a regular flash drive which is what I did. I guess it depends if you want the added functionality of being able to run a few programs. Maybe when there's some usefull U3 software I'll give it another try but right now I just need it for storage.

 

So you say you have successfully booted from those flash drives. Did you have any PE installed on them or just system files? Could you elaborate? Did you reformat the USB drives to FAT, FAT32, or NTFS? Did you enter the multiboot screen via F12 during bootup, or did you have the USBs at a higher boot priority? I am *really* interested in this as I would like to be able to boot from a PE in the event that I have an unrecoverable crash. With a PE on a bootable USB, I can use apps that allow for user data recovery before I need to resort to an Acer recovery disk which, of course, is data destructable. TIA,

Talon

 

This is what I did. I formatted the keys as FAT. Using Windows Explorer, I formated a 3.5" floppy disk with the "Create an MS-DOS startup disk" option checked, this gave me my boot image. I then used the "HP USB Disk Storage Format Tool" to burn the boot image to the keys.

On the Acer I gave the USB HDD the highest priority. I plugged the key in an empty slot and rebooted. MSDOS Millenium edition booted up. I do not see a reason that the F12 multiboot will not work. I have since reformatted the USB Keys so don't have them available to try.

First I tried FreeDOS but got a bunch of error messages then a Couldn't find Command.com error. Then I briefly tried a DrDOS image I downloaded but the HP Tool didn't recognize it as a boot image (I'm sure I'd need to do something else with it to make it work). When I get more time I'll play around with loading up some recovery programs, one of which is SpinRite. Also with either (I can't remember) FreeDOS or DrDOS there are drivers for NTFS, USB, and Firewire(?).

 

What do you get when the keys are not "bootable"? Does the BIOS still show the key as present? My BIOS doesn't even show the key as even being physically there. I've made the key bootable using MKBT then tried copying Bart's PE onto it and no luck. I do have a Bytech IDE to USB adapter which shows a bare HDD when attached and it is listed in the boot menu. But for the life of me, I can't get this Corsair Voyager to be recognized. And it has been reformatted as FAT by the HP util.

 

After freshly formating the Lexar JumpDrive (no system files, non bootable) as FAT, the BIOS still sees it.

USB HDD: LEXAR JUMPDRIVE SECURE

At this point in time you may just want to try a different flash key to see if the problem is with the notebook or the Corsair Voyager.

 

FINALLY!!! I received my new Transcend 2GB Jetflash and was successful in booting from it into BartPE a pre-installed environment giving me full capability to browse files and recover user data. Happy days!!

Talon

 

Congratulations on getting it to work, I'll have to check out BartPE. Just out of curiosity how much disk space does your BartPE take up.

 

Thanks. BartPE takes up about 350MB. But I have another quandry. I'm currently in contact with Corsair about the failure of this Flash drive to boot. They assure me that it can and must be an incompatibility with the Acer BIOS. However, some observations I've made are suggesting that the drive may be at fault. In their properties pages both are listed as Removable drives, formatted as FAT and use the same XP drivers and policies for removal(quick). BUT, the Corsair page has a Disk Cleanup button and the Transcend Jetflash page does not. This suggests that the drives are NOT seen the same. Rather, the Corsair MAY be seen as a FIXED drive. Furthermore, when I put both drives into the USB ports on the Acer, and I go into the BIOS screen, the Transcend is recognized and the Corsair is not(we knew this). BUT as the BIOS is loading both drives Access LEDs are flickering and the Trancend's light remains on. The Corsair light goes out. This suggests that the BIOS is trying to read both drives and the Transcend drive is seen but the Corsair fails and perhaps that's why the light goes out. Are your LEDs on your USB drives continually lit when plugged in? Am I onto something here?

Talon

 

My Lexar JumpDrive acts the same way as your Corsair. It blinks when it's accessed and the LED is off when not accessed. The Sandisk Cruzer acts like your Jetflash, the LED is always on and then blinks when accessed. Also the property page for the JumpDrive shows the Disk Cleanup but the Cruzer does not show one. I also get a recycle bin for the JumpDrive and none for the Cruzer. Also under Disk Management the option to delete partition on the Cruzer is greyed out and is not for the JumpDrive. My JumpDrive is over a year old and acts more like a harddrive than the Cruzer which is only a week only. I wonder if this is a way to tell the difference between "old" and "new" flash drives? I think Corsair is correct, there probably is a conflict with the BIOS but the problem is on the Corsair side.

 

Not sure, I think the problem is with the various USB "standards" that seem to sometimes be followed, sometimes not, which mean that some things work, others don't.

Not sure how much use it is but I have an external 2.5" hard drive that won't detect (it shows on the BIOS boot screen, but then isn't an option to boot from) I have two USB keys, one is fine for booting from (even with nothing on it) the other won't allow me to try to boot no matter what I do. I've got an external 3.5" hard drive that is fine to boot from... seems to be luck of the draw, wish I could find my 32MB SD card as that might be the perfect size for a bootable device..

 

Weird. I reformatted my Transcend with the included disk. I chose the partition utility and it created two partitions. Since I wanted to use the boot option on one of them, I had to again reformat so that the boot partition would be < 500MB. Then, when I booted it in the Acer, the BIOS saw it as a USB Key. When it had a single partition, it was seen as a USB HDD. Strange stuff.

Talon

 

Hi

Maybe this adds to the confusion in a productive way:
1.
You cannot install Windows on a medium that is seen as removable.
If a media is considered fixed you should see it in Windows diskmanagement. (Have a try for both the Lexar and the Corsair)
2.
Thus you have to apply tricks to let windows see the medium as fixed.
A universla trick for USB flash drives (if they are not seen as fixed media already) is using the driver for the Hitachi minidrive and adapt the VID/PID IDs in this driver (search the web and you'll find it)
After that you can even partition your flash drive from within Windows.
3.
BartPE with Bart's trick of using a few files from Windows Server 2003 bypasses the limitation by copying the installed image in a RAM drive in memory.
4.
It's NOT advisable to run windows directly from a flash drive. It would wear down the drive very fast due to the many write operations during normal windows operation.
A German Guy named Dietmar (search) is trying something with combining Windows XP and Windows Embedded to sort out this problem (Windows Embedded allows for a specific layor in memory (EWF) which stores most/all of the variable data that wouldnormally be written to disk.
Dietmar's approach is still a bit "juggling with chainsaws in the night whihc may work on a cloudless full moon night".

Still it would be "interesting" to have Windows running directly from an USB flash drive (unlike Bart's RAMdive solution, though that covers most needs, like recovery)

Cheers

Drio

 

Now when you say it is not advisable to run Windows from a flash drive are you specifically speaking about the official Windows PE or ANY pre-installed environment like BartPE, Slax, Knoppix, or whatever? Also, my Transcend Flash drive is, in fact, seen by Windows as a removeable drive, yet is seen by the BIOS as a bootable drive. Why is that? My Corsair is seen as removable by Windows but not seen at all by the BIOS.

 

Hello friends.
I've just found an interesting piece of software: A64Info.
You can find more details here.
Looks like this one may be a winner: it should allow to change both CPU and RAM settings from within Windows.
I've not tried it out yet, but it looks promising.