Utility to enable MSI hidden BIOS settings without flashing a modded BIOS

Enabling MSI hidden BIOS settings without flashing a modded BIOS​

With UEFI booting and GPT it is possible to change the settings in your laptop without having to use the BIOS setup. This has been made especially easy with the latest MSI laptops. Just having bought one, my first MSI, and I'm pretty much impressed by this. I have attached a small utility for enabling those hidden menus in BIOS that works for my GE60-2OE and I suspect will work for the other latest models with full UEFI booting but I have little time these days to investigate the possibilities.

It is my belief that only a fraction of the options are shown to stop people making the wrong changes in BIOS and ending up with a malfunctioning notebook then subsequently bothering MSI with their mistakes. So be warned, only try this if you know what you are doing in the BIOS and YOU take full responsibility for your actions, none of us want to hear sob stories Even then BIOS changes might not result in what is expected so be careful. There are far too many options to show when enabled so I will not bother with pics.

Requirements are

• Boot Windows Vista SP1 and above, in UEFI (GPT).
• Use on a BIOS that has NOT had the BIOS setup hacked, OROM changes and others are okay.

If booting UEFI and GPT is a problem then there is another longer method that can used. Depending how this goes and what time I have for it I might add that later. If anyone tries please let us know your results, bug reports.


Straight forward enough I think.



If selecting "Yes" hopefully you will see



You can use the software to switch back to hiding the settings again, if you want to, or just to check if it is set. Use the load defaults in the BIOS to reset everything back to out of the box settings.



It's very nice of MSI to provide this functionality, please don't do something silly and make them regret it, thanks. For the record I'm not associated with MSI, just a user albeit a new user and so far happy with it..

Links Removed


For those not using GPT the following attachment "UEFI_MSI_Enabler.zip" can be used instead. I've tried to make this as simple as possible.

Extract with folders to the root of a FAT32 USB flash drive. The copyright notice is in the root folder. Note that it uses the the standard Bootx64.efi naming so if you already have one of these then you will need to temporarily rename it if you want to keep it. Alternatively the Bootx64.efi file can be extracted and run under a UEFI shell. Note that as with most EFI programs, including Intels shell, it's not signed so secure boot will need to be temporarily disabled. Boot the USB falsh drive under UEFI "UEFI:....". Remove the drive once you have finished with it or disable the USB flash drive from the boot priority. The bootx64.efi file only needs to be run once to make a change and afterward can be deleted if you no longer need it.

If you have the option and extra BIOS setting are hidden then you should see this

Note that changes will only be made when you answer yes. In the above "y" for "YES" was pressed and the changes made.

If the extra BIOS settings are already enabled then running the program will give you the option to hide them again.

In this case another key other than "y" was pressed so no changes were made.

If your system does not have the MSI option to show the extra settings then you should see this

Once again, no changes are made.

Links removed

 

Yes be careful guys, don't go bricking them please.

 

Good advice.

The main reason for sharing this is that there have been a few users looking at modifying their BIOS and flashing it which has a lot more risk associated with it. With the above method it can be used without any changes to the original BIOS firmware. My main concern would be inappropriate settings, for instance trying to overclock RAM or changing some other settings which prevents the laptop booting. A physical CMOS reset would then be required.

 

interesting

 

Can't download the utiliity. The link is fine, file is there on the server, but when i click "download" button, it shows "page not found". Tryed it several times, still same. Would you be so kind and upload it elsewhere? Thank you

Also. Is there a way to turn off the blue LEDs on front side of notebook? They are quite usefull, but when watching a movie at night i found them pretty annoying (they are really bright at night with lights off). Tryed google it, but didn't found a solution Sticking duktape over it, isn't best way to turn those off I hoped there will be some option in unlocked bios

Forget to mention i have ge60 2oe

 

That's strange, works for me. I do have javascript disabled if that makes a difference. No LED settings.

Here's the file from there View attachment 103228

 

It worked great on my MSI GE60-2OE.
I've got a question: MSI has just released a BIOS update (512/712) for our laptop, would this tool make any kind of incompatibility with that update? It's currently unavaiable but i hope it gets online soon.

Thank you for your work!

 

No one knows for sure with these community mods but the structure of the bios tends not to change much.

 

There are no changes made to the BIOS firmware just a NV storage variable. For instance "Secure Boot" in the BIOS setup is a storage variable. When you change it from enabled/disabled the new value is stored. When you flash the BIOS is usual for standard defaults to be loaded. If the default for "Secure Boot" is enabled and you previously set it to disabled then after the flash it would be enabled again. Similarly if you have enabled the hidden options then they would be hidden again.

EDIT: Be aware that 8.1 BIOS also has a EC firmware update. Not sure why there's separate BIOS for different OS, I have W7, W8 and W8.1 Preview seemingly working okay with just the BIOS the laptop came with.

 

Still unable to download. From original link, and from second link you provided (on second link it says "network error"). No idea why, it's really wierd. (tryed it with javascript on/off). I was looking for the blue LED's switch off above all, so I guess i don't need it anyway. Think i'll use the new oficial BIOS, but thanks for your effort. I appretiate there's some community around this model

 

What kind of settings is this opening up for people?

 

There are too many settings to show them all and most of those will not need to be messed with but there may be a few useful ones to a few people. Those not familiar with BIOS settings would be better advised to leave it alone.

Just a couple of screen shots to give some idea.

Before using MSI_Enabler

Advanced menu





After using MSI_Enabler

Advanced options. Too many to fit on one screen shot.




Advanced CPU sub menu




Continuation of CPU sub menu



Sorry for the poor quality.

 

Be aware that a lot of cpu settings are dummy menus left over from the previous gen.

 

A lot of the previous GEN CPU settings also apply to the new GEN. There is of course the mew setting "LakeTiny" which is required for the Intel Dynamic Storage Accelerator on Haswell which is defaulted to disabled on my BIOS. Now DSA works fine on my system.

Which CPU settings do you believe to be dummies?

There maybe some settings that do not work such as the "Launch to Shellx64.EFI" under a different menu, well it does not seem to work for me.

 

Hi, I'm on Windows 8.1 Final and have tried to use this app, but get the following error message when running it: "The system could not find the environment option that was entered.". I have no antivirus installed and Windows Defender is disabled.

Any help as to how to resolve this would be appreciated. Thanks.

 

Which BIOS are you using?

 

A barebones bios. I could upload it if it would be of any use?

 

Sure, I'll take a look. You can PM if you do not want it public.

 

Looks like I'm not able to post pm's yet as I haven't made five posts. I've uploaded the bios.

 

Okay, you can delete it.

 

Thanks for taking the time to look at it.

 

Okay it uses a different method to hide settings so that's why you got the message you did.

For instance under Advanced you may have something like

• PCI Latency Timer
• Intel(R) SpeedStep(tm)
• SATA Mode Selection

While other options are hidden

• PCI Subsystem Settings
• ACPI Settings
• Trusted Computing
• CPU Configuration
• PCH-IO Configuration
• SATA Information
• Thermal Configuration
• System Agent (SA) Configuration
• Intel(R) Rapid Start Technology
• PCH-FW Configuration
• Intel(R) Anti-Theft Technology Configuration
• AMT Configuration
• Acoustic Management Configuration
• USB Configuration
• Intel(R) Smart Connect Technology
• Platform Misc Configuration
• Serial Port Console Redirection
• AMI Graphic Output Protocol Policy
• Network Stack
• Intel RC Drivers Version Detail
• Switchable Graphics

The way it's done is messier than with the other method used on MSI laptops so providing a program for this isn't so straight forward. While it may work on this BIOS it could have a bad affect if run on a different BIOS.

Are you familiar with using "Shellx64.efi" ?

 

Not as far as I'm aware. I'm familiar with afuwinx64, afudos and AfuEfix64.efi, but when I tried to flash a bios I modded with amibcp in both windows and booting into dos with a usb stick, it just threw the error: ""Unable to start a secure flash session"; not sure if that has any relevance.

I would call myself fairly competent with windows and pc's so if you could assist me at all, I'd be grateful. Again thanks for all the help.

 

I'll have a think about this and get back to you tomorrow sometime.

Shellx64.efi is a command line tool for UEFI. If you want to look at this there are a few different builds around but basically try V2.0 x64. For MSI the easiest way is to get a FAT32 USB flash drive and rename Shellx64.efi to BOOTX64.EFI, create folder path EFI/BOOT from the root directory and place BOOTX64.EFI in there then boot the USB drive using UEFI. No need to make it a bootable drive as in the legacy days. Note that shellx64.efi will not be signed so it needs it's hash added or signed with one of your own keys that you have added to the BIOS key store. If the key thing is a problem then easiest way is to disable secure boot so that signing is not required.

From there use help -? or help -h (varies with different builds) and add the -b option to break the output. This will give you a list of embedded commands. These commands can be used to make the necessary change without having to produce a Windows program that if, unlike MSI_Enabler, used on a different BIOS version could cause problems.

 

Thanks, that's very helpful/informative. I'll give it a go tomorrow as its late right now.

Edit: Gave it a go and got into uefi shell using v2.0 of shellx64; unfortunately had no idea what to do from there on tbh.

 

Does that mean you are not comfortable using it? If so I could make a one off program for Windows but you should make sure you only use it on the BIOS version you sent me to be safe and not distribute it otherwise there's a chance of breaking things.

If you do have time to learn the UEFI shell it is quite powerful. For instance with the GE and possibly the other MSI gaming machines of 2012/2013 it is possible to actually show the Hidden Function option in the BIOS which is normally not shown to users.

Hidden Function Option set as default to Enabled



Hidden Function Option set to Disabled


Unfortunately as you already know, your Barebones BIOS does not have this nice feature so we have to use a cruder method to unhide the options. Let me know your preference, Windows or Shell?

 

It wasn't so much that I was uncomfortable with using shell, it's just that once I was in shell, I couldn't figure out what I was meant to do from there on to be able to edit whether the bios settings were hidden.

 

That's good. Here is something to start of with.

First thing to try is dump your setup store .

At the command line enter
dmpstore Setup

To access your storage you need to check the mapping first. The shell probably mapped when you first ran it but output may have been scrolled past the screen so enter
map -b

You should see file system mapping to block devices such as FS0, FS1 etc...
Look for the mapping which shows your USB device. For instance if it is FS0 then enter
FS0:

You can check the file list. Enter
ls -b

The -b option is to scroll one page at a time.

To dump the setup store to a file enter
dmpstore Setup -s fs0:\dump.nub

Substitute fs0 with the proper mapping to your USB device.

Once you have this file maybe you can PM it, attach it or post the first few lines in a code box.

 

Okay, seems most of the V2 shells are not complete yet and I can not seem to find an updated one. The dmpstore has had guid added to it to differentiate between same named variables.

Try this V1.0 instead.

 

V1.0 worked perfectly. I've pm'd you the dump file it created.

 

Nice work nub234. Now you have your dump file you need to edit it. The shell comes with a hex editor. I'll assume your file is on the root of fs0 so change fs0 to wherever your file is located with folder hierarchy if not in root. For instance if located on fs2 under the EFI\BOOT folder then use fs2:\boot\efi\dump.nub

enter
hexedit fs0:\dump.nub

You need to change the byte at offset 0x00000029 to 5A. Note that this is very specific to your BIOS and version and must not be used on other BIOS versions. I know I keep mentioning this but I want to make sure the point gets across to anyone reading this, not just to you.



Press F2 to save and pick a new file name fs0:\dump.new

Press F3 to exit

Make sure your happy with the new file. Note that it contains 2 Setup's with different GUID's. With ver 2.0 shell you can specify the GUID as well but unfortunately it seems the load and save functions are missing for now. You could cut out the second entry but it seems okay if you leave it there.

If you are happy with the file, there should only be one byte changed (at offset 0x29) and the new file should be the same size as the dump.nub file.

To load the new file enter

dmpstore Setup -l fs0:\dump.new

Note the -l is a lower case "L" if it is hard to read. The help file will explain dmpstore -? -b

Exit the shell and reboot to BIOS setup if needed.

When a new BIOS version comes out it is quite likely some of the variables in the Setup are mapped differently and/or there is a change in size. This is why you must be very careful of this mod not to use it on a different BIOS version and why people complain about losing all their BIOS settings when updating, the old settings can not be guaranteed to be in the same place. Gone are the legacy days where just a couple of hundred bytes were used in the CMOS RTC. Now with UEFI, settings are mostly stored on the BIOS chip using 64kB and upwards of storage.

 

Wow Dufus, thank you very much for the detailed instructions. I'll go ahead and give this a go. Just a quick question; you mentioned that when the BIOS is updated the values are likely to change. Is there a simple way I can find out which value to change in the future updates or is that a lot more complicated?

Edit: Gave it a go, and although the change sticks for that session, as soon as I reboot, the change made disappears.

 

Thanks for the feedback nub234. Possibly there is another mechanism at work that uses that variable to enable/disable the advanced setting in which case manually changing it isn't going to work.

Are there any specific BIOS settings you are interested in changing?

 

There were actually quite a few setting I was interested in changing. I wanted to try undervolting the cpu, and disabling both hyperthreading and turbo to try and get the laptop to run cooler. There were some other things too, but that was the main cause for wanting to unlock the BIOS.

 

Okay, there are no undervolting options in the BIOS but you could try Intel XTU for this.

Turbo can be disabled with Throttlestop or IIRC Realtemp has this too.

HTT is restricted to the BIOS. You could change offset 0x55 from 01 to 00 to disable it in dump.nub.

 

Turbo can be disabled also in bios.

 

Thought I'd bring my system specific convo over here as it is more related to this thread than TS thread. Here is a screen shot of the advanced tab and the link I provided in the PM was for the dump.nub from my system.

 

double post

 

Sorry for the late reply, have had a rather busy day so I haven't got around to trying out the hyperthreading BIOS edit yet. If you don't mind me asking Dufus, how did you find which offset to edit for hyperthreading.

 

Hi TANWare, there are 2 advanced tab options on your Samsung, a basic one which you are using and another one with more options such as

• PCI Subsystem Settings
• ACPI Settings
• CPU Configuration
• SATA Configuration
• Thermal Configuration
• DPTF Configuration
• Intel(R) Rapid Start Technology
• PCH-FW Configuration

etc...

Unfortunately I do not know how your other advanced tab would be enabled. However these variables for now can be changed either through Windows if using GPT or via the "EFI Shell". Just a case of knowing what's where. The later MSI BIOS are very good in this respect (except barebone it seems) than only one store which contains just a single byte can be changed to enable the extended advanced options. I will look at adding the UEFI Shell method to the first post for those who do not boot GPT.

Hi nub234, FWIW I like to have some control over my hardware and basically looked into this when EFI first came out on laptops. I had a HP Compaq which was set for AHCI only and needed to run some other OS in IDE mode. It was pretty annoying that this option was not given. Today of course it's easier to run these other systems in VM. Anyway the method I use to find out "what is what" is similar to this post by marcan but different.

 

I always suspected there was a second tab that Samsung keeps to themselves. TBH I do not care about all the extra's Memory bandwidth does not seem to be a limitation on performance, or at least not a severe one.

Much prefer your method of just modifying the setup and reloading rather than a full bios flash including the setup. I've mentioned before but will mention again on the HM76 modding the dump for the extra bins works well with the i7-3820..............

 

I think the choice of the site where the file was uploaded to blocks some people from downloading the file.

I tried using 3 different browsers and 2 OS and always got page not found until I used hotspot shield to mask my real location and give me a US IP address.

Only then was I able to get the file.

IMO,it's not a good site.

MEGA and Mediafire are much better or a multi link site.

 

For those not booting Windows GPT I have added a native UEFI program to the first post which can be used instead.

Noted but since there hasn't been that much feedback I'm not sure it's worth the effort. It should also work on some of the older MSI models, not just the new ones. There was an NBR link also a few posts down, for now I'll copy that to the first post.

 

In the 1st post Only the UEFI_MSI_Enabler.zip NBR link works for me.????

The 2 external links return a The connection was reset" message with the "Try Again" button after clicking on the
"Click here to start download from sendspace"

The GPT NBR link also returns a "The connection was reset" message with the "Try Again" button

These are the only issues I've ever encountered downloading files.

 

I can understand if external links may give problems but don't know why the NBR link is, it does work for me. Very strange. :s

Do you have an anti virus program? Maybe that's blocking it as assembler files do seem to come up as "suspicious" on quite a few of them. BTW if anyone has this problem with the program being flagged your more than welcome to send it to your anti virus software house for analysis.

You have a GP model, is that right? Have you tried it on your laptop? The UEFI version should work regardless of GPT.

 

This utility WORKS on MSI GX60-1AC too.

Thank you Dufus

 

So what hidden options do you have access to now?

 

You can try it yourself its harmless.(you can disable back the advanced bios options with the same utility too)

 

Thanks for your work buddy, tried this solution but it seems that it doesn't work on the latest Bios for Barebone 1763-001 (780m GTX) -> GT70-2OD similar. I use your utility and says ok, but when i reboot to Bios no changes.

 

Thanks for the feedback guys.

slayer2333 you can check if it is set by running utility again. If it is set then you should be asked if you want to disable hidden settings instead of enabling them. This can be done without making changes by not selecting "YES".

If you want to provide a link to your BIOS I will take a look at it.