Asus Zenbook Bios and Firmware Modding Thread

WARNING I TAKE NO RESPONSIBILITY IF YOU DESTROY YOUR BIOS, IT STEALS YOUR GIRLFRIEND OR EATS YOUR CAT.

I have done this on a Asus Zenbook UX32VD running bios 213.
I replaced in my Zenbook with a 128gig Samsung 840 PRO SSD and a 8 gig Ram module instead of stock 500 gig HD and 4 gig stick.

I did these steps in a clean install of Windows 8 PRO 64 bit.

Step 1:

Download this:
http://www.sendspace.com/file/v2u9yh
Extract it and run MEtool.exe

This will update your intel ME firmware to 8.1.40.1416

Once it completes it will ask to reboot. Do it.

Now we can dump your current Bios

Step 2:

Download This:
http://www.sendspace.com/file/8mg7sv

Extract it to C:\

Open a Command Line in Administrator Mode and enter this:

FPTW64.EXE -BIOS -D BACKUP.ROM

This tool with the command above will create a BACKUP of your current bios.

Make sure you SAVE A COPY of the backup.rom safe somewhere in case you need to go back to stock.

Step 3:
Download this:
http://www.sendspace.com/file/pz9fzf

There is 2 tools in here that can mod your rom.

MMTool.exe It can insert Updated Modules for video and sata.
AMIBCP.exe This one opens up locked Bios settings.

OPTIONAL STEP Step 4

Open your rom with AMIBCP.exe

You want to change the Access/USE column ONLY. If you mess around with anything else in here, you are on your OWN!

Boot your Zenbook to it's BIOS and see what feature are already unlocked. You don't need to enable those again in the tool above.

Now go through the area's you want to enable and click the DEFAULT text and change it to USER

Once you are done this save this Rom as MOD.ROM

Close AMIBCP.exe

Step 5

Intel RSTe RAID ROM v12.6.0.1867

http://www.sendspace.com/file/98d7pl

Follow C. Processing of an AMI UEFI BIOS file from guide below
Step 3:
http://www.win-lite.de/wbb/board208...pci-rom-modules-of-an-ami-phoenix-award-bios/

Step 6

Now to flash your modded bios.

Make sure the file sizes of your backup and MOD are the same if so go forward. if not DO NOT.

Open a Command Line in Administrator Mode and enter this:

FPTW64.EXE -BIOS -F MOD.ROM

Once it completes restart your pc. Once it comes back to windows do a shutdown and pull out your power cable.

Wait 10-15 seconds and then start it up and boot into your bios.

All the settings you enabled will be there for you!


Other Notes:

If you want to go back to your backup rom for whatever reason just replace MOD.ROM with BACKUP.ROM

WHEN a New bios from ASUS is released, I suggest flashing back to your BACKUP.ROM and flashing the asus bios normally, then repeating this process on that bios once you have it installed.

(Version 2.0) Added Intel Raid Rom and updated ME FW

 

Do you know how to add a feature where I have the option to stop charging my battery at 80%?

 

Why would you want that?

 

bios's are all unique using the method in top post. No universal flash for now..

 

Since this BIOS mod method is based on a dump of your currently flashed BIOS, then probably every person will have to do this on their own computer themselves.

Now, I think it is entirely possible to create a generic BIOS image that can be flashed by every person. Here are some links that could be useful in finding a way to do that. Some might not even be useful or relevant
flashrom tool to flash BIOS on OSX. Will need to look into if we can use it on Linux
Flashrom Darwin Port - Project OS X Forums

Changing visibility of different settings by hand using disassembler, modifying code, etc
Unlocking the new Asus 3xxx Sandy/Ivy Bridge bios - Tutorials (The Genius Bar) - InsanelyMac Forum

Some sort of a funky way to flash BIOS on ASRock motherboard:
MSI, Asrock and Foxconn 1155 Patched Bios Thread - Page 39

Extracting the BIOS from a file or something
MSI, Asrock and Foxconn 1155 Patched Bios Thread - Page 28

Simple way to patch BIOS
Bios Repo

Some guy wants to modify UX32VD BIOS and some explanation
http://www.insanelymac.com/forum/to...fi-patching-utility/page__st__40#entry1885316

Confirmation of being able to flash patched BIOS on an ASUS board using EASY FLASH
http://www.insanelymac.com/forum/to...fi-patching-utility/page__st__60#entry1885608

Tool that can possibly be used to flash a patched BIOS on a machine that takes .cap RSA encrypted BIOS. Probably not relevant to Zenbooks
http://www.insanelymac.com/forum/to...i-patching-utility/page__st__100#entry1885961


PMPatch that patches power management menu in BIOS could possibly be used to repack Zenbook modified BIOS
http://www.insanelymac.com/forum/topic/285444-pmpatch-uefi-patching-utility/

Russian PMPatch thread with some good stuff
http://www.applelife.ru/threads/Универсальный-патчер-uefi-биосов.37815/
http://www.applelife.ru/threads/Патч-Биоса-uefi-Серии-Аsus-p8xxx.34578/page-14#post-307532
http://www.applelife.ru/threads/Патч-Биоса-uefi-Серии-Аsus-p8xxx.34578/page-15#post-314986

Dell UEFI modification. Very useful and important!
http://www.bios-mods.com/forum/Thread-UEFI-Dell-XPS-15z-L511z-modded-BIOS-and-HOWTO
http://www.bios-mods.com/blog/unlocked-motherboards/2012/12/bios-spotlight-uefi-dell-xps-15z-l511z/

 

Yea I know about coderush, I haven't got in contact with him yet. And yes I may be able to provide a standard flashable bios for everyone, but until I can compare 2 dumps to know for certain what is being dumped and what isn't between 2 machines I don't want to post a file that could mess up someone's machine.

 

Alright, I will get you a 213 dump from my UX32VD once I finish some work. I might need to update my BIOS to 213 first as I think I am on 212 right now. Have you tried to compare your dumped BIOS to the one you can download from Asus?

Read the first post on where and how to find and replace VBIOS for both Intel and Nvidia
(UEFI) Dell XPS 15z L511z modded BIOS - and HOWTO

 

I know where to replace the video bios's i already did the intel one and it works fine except the display doesn't initialize before windows boots up. May need a hex edit. I cannot access the bios or anything.

Also I need a dumped bios via the same tool to see if it's dumping serial numbers and things not present in the bios's asus gives us.

In that dell post they have patched there intel video bios, I have to figure out how, the rest doesn't apply to us since we have AMI bios and they have phoenix.

 

There is a newer version of ME available, please update the link in your post. Also, the link you posted requires registration. And I think you meant to say driver and not firmware

МЕ 8.1.30.1349 intel_mei_8.1.30.1349.7z

 

This decreases battery wear.

 

Works on UX32A?

EDIT: Tried, doesnt seem to apply any changes, after following all steps and entering bios its still the same as before

EDIT2: Nevermind it works, one just needs to enable to show submenus also.

But I am still unable to show "Chipset" tab in my BIOS. Even tho I set it to USER in main root of BIOS file

 

So do we get any information on how to set the bio to fix the fan problem yet?

 

The fix is already there, you need to set the thermal monitoring thingy under advanced to USER and everything in that category, it willl show up in a bios. But the real question is, does it actually do anything, since I tried to experiment it, and set for every "trip" the fan speed 0 but the fan still kept going

 

It appears that the fan is entirely controlled by the Embedded Controller firmware. So the permanent solution would be to extract the EC firmware from the BIOS upgrade file, decompile it, make the necessary modifications to the fan table, compile it, reintegrate into the BIOS, flash.

I have tried to find where exactly the Embedded Controller firmware is in the BIOS file, however I was not able to find it. Maybe someone else will have more luck?

You will need a stock BIOS image from ASUS website and PhoenixTool prograg (google for it). Then you simply open up PhoenixTool, load the ASUS BIOS and look through the newly created DUMP directory for the EC firmware.

 

Any guidelines making sure which one of these dump thingys is ec and should I hex edit them or is there some sort of tool?

 

Our bios is AMI, Not phoenix.

 

I will also post a how to update your Intel SATA Orom to latest version out.

 

There are no guidelines. It is all guess work. The EC we have is ITE Corportation Inc. IT8572G. Ideally, finding a string of "ITE Corp" or "ITETech" or something along those lines would probably be the EC firmware, however I did not find that string in any of the modules.
The only way to find it is to remove the modules you are 100% sure are NOT EC firmware and then closely examine each one. What may also help is find out how others were able to find EC firmware in UEFI BIOS.

 

I'll try to find it, but since there are almost 500 of these in DUMP I might write some program in C# that checks all files for given string, might go bit faster

Anyways, my goals are actually different but what the heck, I'll try to learn that new territory.

What I want to do is run RAM at 1600 ( since I have the UX32A with the sandy bridge i3 which limits ram to 1333 and AMIBCP didnt seem to solve that issue)

EDIT: seems like none of the files include strings like that or similar.

Few of the most interesting I found: http://www.upload.ee/files/3068570/files.zip.html

NOTE: From UX32A BIOS

 

Did you enable the ram settings in the bios? I haven't tried them yet.

Also Ivybridge won't have any gains from upping the ram to 1600. The memory controller onboard only uses ddr 1333.

 

Yes tried them, cpuz still showed that its at 1333.
I was hoping to get a little boost to HD3000, and ram should give me some

 

I have a UX51VZ and have tried to enable some advanced menu options in the BIOS. When anything in the main menu (Advanced, Chipset, Boot etc.) is changed the BIOS saves without problem but trying to flash the changed BIOS fails at the verification stage, is this normal or is the editor just not compatible with this machine?

 

You have to edit the BIOS dump from your computer and then flash it in Windows as per instructions in the 1st post.

The BIOS that you download from the ASUS website has an additional 2KB data in the beginning of the BIOS file that lists checksums and some other (unknown) stuff and if you edit that BIOS then it will definitely fail verification using Easy Flash option in the BIOS.

So, if you do want to unlock the hidden stuff, follow post1 exactly how it says.

I know they aren't there because I already looked . On a side note, you can use built-in Linux utilities to search for those things, no need to write your own programs.

I have looked at the files you posted, and all of them are related to ACPI stuff, mainly DSDT, SSDT, FACP, etc, tables. The only one I could not identify was 08A2CA63-3B65-472C-874E-5E138E947324_1_22.ROM

 

the 08 one also seemed interesting because if you hex edit scroll to the end you\ll see ASUSITERT

There were some more with asus .. (some text) rt, there were also more with ASUS ITE, so maybe its not in a single file

 

Well I did edit a BIOS dump from this machine :/ I can do some changes (Default -> User) without problem in lower level menus but touching anything in top level menus or some low level ones leads to errors when verifying.

 

Does the size remain the same? Check bytes in properties for both

 

Yes the sizes are the same.

 

Latest Management Engine? Also a BIOS dump would help

 

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I will re-upload it.

 

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Here you go!

 

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http://www.sendspace.com/file/zsbplq

 

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What do you mean it did not help?

Help what?

 

Hi
I have UX32A and damaged sectors on SSD, and i needed full disable SSD in Bios
This instruction have fully enable/disable sata1 hdd (ssd)?

 

Hi there and thanks for the guide! I am curious what hidden settings do you recommend enabling in AMIBCP? There are so many there that I'm kinda lost...

 

I will test my updated Intel 4000HD video bios and post a guide if it works.

Same with SATA update to v12 also

So far so good!

Have to test out the hdmi out and what not.

But it looks like the updated HD4000 vbios I modded works perfect!

and the Sata V12 orom works too!

 

Hi,

Can I didn't understood well the purpose of this thread. What are the main point in putting the modded BIOS ?

Another question is how did you manage to put WIN8 PRO 64bits on the SSD ? Is it an official version ? If not how did you activate it ?

Thanks for you help

 

Followed this guide then now i can't launch CSM anymore. Tried to revert to my backup bios but the same

 

What happens when you boot the laptop?

 

When it finished flashing the BIOS i press exit then i shut off the laptop. Then i unplug for 15s then replug, start, then it enters the bios automatically. I activate CSM then save but it doesn't keep the changes so i can't boot on the issd anymore or boot on uefi. Other trouble is that most of the time i can't enter the bios anymore it just keep the booting process to windows without allowing me to stop it.

I precise that i know how to enter the bios .......
In the beginning i wanted to modify thermal options so that i can prevent my laptop to slow down CPU for no reason when it around 80° C. I finally revert to my backup as there are too many options to check (put user instead of default)

 

It seems it is more linked to the BIOS 213 itself as i upgraded a few hours before trying your MOD.

http://forum.notebookreview.com/asus/701504-zenbook-ux32vd-bios-issue-post-213-flash.html

Do you have any technic that would permit to activate an option without having to tick each little options behinds (put user) ?

 

So what is this BIOS enabling people to do?

 

The procedure permit you to activate non visible options in the BIOS like thermal and fan management for example

 

This weekend I will post a guide on the main post how to update your SATA OROM and Intel 4000HD video bios also.

 

Any news ?

 

dead thread ?

 

No Just updating a few things, I will post them tomorrow!