Page 3 of 3
Posted: Wed Jan 02, 2008 11:04 am
by short101
Hrm, after installing windows on my t60 and getting a dump with winphlash, the only file I can see that has the id's is bioscod5.rom. offset 0500 has the product and vendor id's in it. Its the only file from the dump that has these id's so looks promising so far. Heres the intersting bit
9911 1802 (from sierra.c in the kernel is a mc5720)
9911 0468 (this is the mc8755)
9911 0568 (not in the kernel source, can anyone confirm a product id of 6805?)
edit: after a google, 1199:6805 appears to be a mc8765 ??
These are the only id's that show up in my bios on my t60p. bios version is 2.12 Anyone else have similar results?
Posted: Wed Jan 02, 2008 12:10 pm
by Switchcorp
short101 wrote:edit: after a google, 1199:6805 appears to be a mc8765 ?
i confirm that point !
The X60/T60 doesn't have the MC8775 but the MC8765 !
You can see it there :
http://cgi.ebay.com/Lenovo-IBM-Cingular ... dZViewItem
It's a special rev i think because i couldn't find it on Sierra Webiste
And now ? what's going on ? What's the next step ? What have we got to change ?
Posted: Wed Jan 02, 2008 12:11 pm
by Switchcorp
It's normal that there are only those id !
The two first are for EVDO card and the last one for the HSDPA
It must be the same for Wifi card ?!
Posted: Wed Jan 02, 2008 8:17 pm
by short101
Looking again in the file this morning, I am fairly certain its the right part. Just above the sierra id's are id's for wireless cards. 8086:4227 8086:1010 is the vendor id's and subsystem id's for my 3945 wireless card. Have to travel for the next few days, so I wont be hacking this now, but when I get home I'll edit these id's and flash the bios. Now I just hope it doesn't become an expensive paperweight

Posted: Thu Jan 03, 2008 3:23 am
by Switchcorp
If you don't corrupt the file ... you just change vendor id ... not a critical item in the bios

Posted: Thu Jan 03, 2008 3:32 am
by Switchcorp
I'm wondering what would do the removing of these lines in the bios ?!
Would it whitelist all the wwan cards ?
Would it block all the wwan cards ?
These solution would be the greatest one because if you change change your vendor id .. it's only working for your case but if you disable the whitelist function it would be universal

Posted: Wed Jan 09, 2008 3:38 am
by short101
No matter how many different versions of phoenix's bios editing tool, or winphlash I try, I cannot get either the bios backup file to open, or to save. (I can open it in some cases, but rebuilding it fails with varying errors) And phdeco is not being much help either. Tis proving a bit frustrating, especially as I can edit my R40's bios file and save it succesfully, but I havent flashed it yet, so I am not certain its a good copy. Using the latest bios editor I get a "subscript out of range" error and I cant seem to find a fix or newer version. (though the changelog says this should be fixed) Hopefully tomorrow will prove more fruitful.
One happy thing is that in my travels I found that you can change the bios logo, so I now have a picture of tux with IBM on his belly as my bios splash screen

Posted: Wed Jan 09, 2008 5:32 am
by Switchcorp
I hope that you'll find a solution ! It would be great ... on my side i'm working on finding an unlock possibility for an official MC8775 Cingular

Posted: Thu Jan 10, 2008 5:24 am
by short101
To Mikis, I sent you an email with my cmos dump. Just thought I would mention it here, as I dont know if you just made that email address for this thread and dont check it.
Posted: Sat Jan 12, 2008 1:46 am
by Mikis
short101 wrote:Hrm, after installing windows on my t60 and getting a dump with winphlash, the only file I can see that has the id's is bioscod5.rom. offset 0500 has the product and vendor id's in it. Its the only file from the dump that has these id's so looks promising so far. Heres the intersting bit
How did you get winphlash to produce this bioscod5.rom file?
All it does for me is spit out a .bak file, and my hex editor doesn't find anything in that.
Posted: Sat Jan 12, 2008 2:08 am
by short101
winphlash dumps the bios, but you need phoenix bios editor to uncompress the image into the various modules. phnxdeco apparently can do it also, but I had no success with that. Once you open the bios image with the bios editor, look in its temp directory and you will see the various bios modules.
Mods: before you jump on me, BEdemo is freely avaliable from Phoenix.
I was playing with my cmos dumps also and thought I was onto something for a while there too. Changing various bios options for any of the network cards flips bits in offset 0x3d The topmost bit in this is always 0, so I was hoping that they had just moved where abouts in the cmos the bios checks for the whitelist check and I could just change that bit. Unfortunately, after doing the same thing on my R40, the bits that get changed by making bios changes are in a totally different spot to the bit that gets changed by no1802

This means its down to trying to disassemble the cmos data and I guess BIOSCOD5.ROM to try and see if they even still do the check, and where abouts the bit is that might disable it. Not any easy task I imagine unless you are an x86 assembly guru.

Posted: Sat Jan 19, 2008 7:51 pm
by Zender
http://forum.thinkpads.com/viewtopic.php?t=55837
I've done a lot of research on this over past two days and eventually finished with a modified BIOS, which I'm not really willing to flash without testing to my perfectly working T60 with next to no issues (even if I was willing to pay the price of new motherboard, I'm not guaranteed not to have overheating and other issues).
Though if anyone had a laptop, perhaps with some motherboard issues, which allow it to boot up, but it's not possible to work on it, I would like to ask if we might try flashing it with the modified BIOS (only a device list change, modifying the assembly code not to check devices at all would require the ability to recover from non-working BIOS, at least for me, which Lenovo seems to omit from Phoenix BIOS [most notebooks have it]).
test system available
Posted: Tue May 20, 2008 6:59 pm
by moore101
Hi, I know this is a old thread but I have access to many T60 and X60 systems to test this BIOS "fix". Let me know if you would like me to try the new file. It would be great to the the Rev A cards working on the 60 series.