AES-NI support in TrueCrypt (Sandy Bridge problem)

Hi all,

Links for the G74Sx are all down, so I went and followed carlicious' instructions to hack together my own BIOS ROM. I can't thank you enough for the detailed description!

Story (4 hours worth) follows:

First problem I kept running into (over and over) was something I kept messing up with phoenixtool. Every time I tried to modify the BIOS, the integration step would give me an error about size or indexes of arrays being out of bounds. Obviously messed something up, but for the life of me I couldn't figure out what. So I took a 10 minute break, came back and restarted the procedure all over again. Apparently I did something different (I'm pretty confident I was missing a checkbox under the Advanced options, because my working modified module files were identical to my failed first attempts), because: success! Modified BIOS in hand, I went to flash it. Download WinFlash...it won't install, saying: "Sorry, this program only supports ASUS notebooks." Come again? Must be missing a registry entry or something from the multiple times I've reinstalled Win 7, ok so how to correct that? Googling tells me that installing the ATK WMIACPI driver from the ASUS support page will correct that problem. Must restore a registry entry or file that the WinFlash installer is looking for to see if the computer is an ASUS laptop. Ok, that's working now, but WinFlash presents me with: "The BIOS file version does not match the BIOS ROM version. Click [Exit] to exit.". Well. Much (much) more Googling, this time with no results at all that seem to make it work. Even people that are legitimately trying to upgrade their BIOS with stock ASUS files from their website are running into this issue apparently. Fine, screw it, EZ flash it is! I had a thumb drive handy so I went ahead with that method. Success!...mostly. The Intel Processor ID Utility says my computer still doesn't support AES-NI. Hmm, but the Revision is correctly showing as 1B now (previously 15). Clearly I borked something up unlocking the MSR. I go back and unpack my modified BIOS, sure enough the changes aren't there. Turns out I had modified the file, but never put the new version into the DUMP folder, so yeah. Easy enough fix, a rebuild and reflash later and I'm finally running with AES-NI on my laptop. Thank God. That took forever, but at least I learned a lot (and got to use a hex editor, which I haven't touched in ages).

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Hi Lojack,

Congratulations you just made it
Indeed you could just ask first, I still kept the G74Sx mod on my disk
Anyway, I guess the joy of figure it out all by yourself totally worth the effort.

 

1st let me thank you for all you have done. your explanation was for the most part clear for even I (someone with very basic Unix/Linux command line skills). However, I did run into a little problem. I'm trying to modify a Bios for an Asus K73SV with Intel i7-62630QM processor. the Bios I'm working with is K73SVAS.210 and I did everything you said. I hit a wall after.

for i in `cat interesting_files.txt`; do echo $i; grep -i 0x13c[^0-9a-f] $i; done

My output was different than yours.




Realizing this I decided to proceed by opening up my Hex editor and looking around for both $0x3,%eax & 0x13c and found a few instances

In the case of $0x3,%eax I found it but never with an "or" at the beginning.






I really don't know what is safe to alter here If anything.

for 0x13c this is what I found







could someone just look at the hex editors outputs and tell me where they think I should go from here?

 

Patched it for you.
The instruction is located in 2BB5AFA9-FF33-417B-8497-CB773C2B93BF_1119.ROM at offset 0x2465
You can download the patched bios here https://mega.co.nz/#!5csElACA!evCroGsgT75zFMktrHwFvChQavQv-OKMR68ap6IY2bw

 

Hello,

First of all, thanks for your work, and forgive my english, I'm french .

I'm pretty used to computers, but unfamiliar with Hex.

I've got an Asus U36S with an i52410M CPU and AES-NI disabled, apparently because of outdated BIOS (Crystal CPUID > MSR Editor > MSR Number: 0x13 gives EDX (63-32): 0x00000000; EDX (31-0) 0x00000000).

I've downloaded Phoenix Tool and the the latest BIOS (v206) ( https://www.asus.com/Notebooks_Ultrabooks/U36SD/#support ), and the last microdata.dat on the Intel website ( https://downloadcenter.intel.com/De...irmware&OSFullname=Debian+3.1+Linux*&lang=eng ).


EDIT: I answer to myself, but I've eventually done it.

My BIOS needed both CPU microcode update + 03 > 01, everything now works perfectly. I can send the BIOS if someone needs it.

Regards.

 

Hallo,
sorry for my bad english,
@ Teazle and @ Skywise

I have lost my ethernet. What is the procedure to become it back?? What have you do?

Thanks Christian