The Notebook Review forums were hosted by TechTarget, who shut down them down on January 31, 2022. This static read-only archive was pulled by NBR forum users between January 20 and January 31, 2022, in an effort to make sure that the valuable technical information that had been posted on the forums is preserved. For current discussions, many NBR forum users moved over to NotebookTalk.net after the shutdown.
Problems? See this thread at archive.org.

    Stock A11 Bios M17xR4 flashed to unlocked A11 Bios and lost the embedded Windows 8 OEM key

    Discussion in 'Alienware 17 and M17x' started by ModularMix, Nov 26, 2015.

  1. ModularMix

    ModularMix Newbie

    Reputations:
    0
    Messages:
    7
    Likes Received:
    0
    Trophy Points:
    5
    Hi guys i flashed my A11 Bios to the unlocked A11 Bios by svl7. I flashed the modified Bios from DOS by using the FPT tool (Method 2). The procedure went fine without any hickups . However after a new clean install through the original provided Windows 8.0 recovery disk, Windows Setup asked for the product key, which was strange because it never did that before .To investigate i installed Windows 8 Enterprise Evaluation and used RW-Everything to find the key in the Bios. Then i discovered the MSDM table (which contains the key) is no longer present within the ACPI table.

    Some weeks before the unlock I checked with RW-Everything and it did find the key withing MSDM table, and i made note of it. My System seems to work fine for weeks now, i dont think there is something wrong with the Bios aside from that lost key.

    So have any of you lost the embedded key when unlocking the Alienware M17xR4? What could i have done wrong, do need to set some parameters within the Bios? Or maybe i get the key back when i reflash to the stock A11 Bios? Or is it all just a consequence when you unlock on this system with this method?

    Any insight will be welkom, thank you.
     
  2. ModularMix

    ModularMix Newbie

    Reputations:
    0
    Messages:
    7
    Likes Received:
    0
    Trophy Points:
    5
    Thread can be closed, I had succes using the Belarc Adviser PC Audit tool, so RW-Everything doesn't work for me, but Belarc Adviser does find the Key in the firmware.