Yeah, svl7 and I have tried all kinds of things and no luck. We've tried everything we could think of, and I know he has had other people try some things as well. The ranges that need to be written are write protected by this Secure Flash cancer. That really screwed things up for enthusiasts that wanted Alienware to be their brand of choice. There is probably an exploit nobody has discovered yet, but I'm at the point where giving up and finding another brand for my extreme overclocking enjoyment is a better option... shame too, being such a nice machine and all that. Having the BIOS unlocked won't be much benefit anyway, considering the power handling limitation on the motherboard. If you haven't already figured it out with your new Alienware 18, it does not take much of a GPU overclock to shut it down. If the CPU is overclocked, it takes even less of a GPU overclock to bring it to its knees with that puny 330W AC adapter. Overclocking the 4930MX is no problem at all, as long as you got lucky in the silicon lottery, but without the GPUs rocking a crazy overclock along side the CPU, there's not enough muscle to get the job done.
So, really, having the BIOS unlocked on a machine that can't handle extreme GPU overclocking in SLI is going to be more about conquering Secure Flash for the sake of conquering it than it will be about having a monster performer. At this point it's just a super-duper crazy go nuts "nice gamer" laptop. Running stock it will still kick the Alienware 17's butt with two GPUs, but there's not a lot of fun to be had in running a machine stock. Don't get wrong me... this Secure Flash garbage needs to be defeated for absolutely nothing more than principle... it deserves to be cracked because it's fundamentally wrong and has no right to exist on a machine where it is not wanted.
There might be a way to force a flash using an SPI Programmer or an Arduino switch, but short of that soldering on a new chip with an unlocked BIOS may be the only solution for defeating this Secure Flash filthiness. All of this kind of stuff is over my head and I'd have no idea where to even start with it.
http://makezine.com/2010/08/28/flash-your-computer-bios-with-openb/
http://hackaday.com/2012/05/04/arduino-uno-bios-flasher/
You cannot extract it the normal way as we used to with earlier M18xR2 and M18xR1 BIOS firmware. They decided that life needed to become more difficult for their best and most loyal customers starting with like around A07 or so with the M18xR2. You can flash the new BIOS and then go find the extracted files in the temp folder in your C:\Users directory. The file is named something like VAS10X64.fd so you'll know it's the correct one.
Or, you can use the Phoenix Tool 2.14 and extract it from the BIOS package downloaded from Alienware. You can
download that here.
Unlocking the BIOS is not the problem. The BIOS was unlocked by svl7 as soon as the first Alienware 18 BIOS was available for download. The problem is flashing it. Finding the file and modding it won't do any good because there is no way to get the firmware onto the BIOS chip through normal flashing. It has to be digitally signed by Dell for it to be flashed. As soon as you mod it, the signature is broken. And, we cannot get around it using a blind crisis recovery flash because that does not work any more... they broke that feature, too.
Welcome to the new screwed up world of Secure Flash. You can have your Alienware BIOS any way you want as long as it's their way. Nice, huh?
Edit: the file is named VAS10A09.fd (for A09).
Here's a copy of it:
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Last edited by a moderator:
May 6, 2015
DumbDumb and n=1 like this.
Problems? See this thread at archive.org.
GOOD LUCK!
