KezNews Forum

Need Assistance with Foxconn A7GM-S Mod
Fetched: December 24th, 2008, 1:20pm CET

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Author: Psipherious
Forum: Windows Vista
Date: 2008-12-24

Hey guys, As stated in the topic title, board is Foxconn A7GM-S.

This board uses a AMI BIOS, I completely new to this modding bios' so having some trouble. I already tried the AMI SLIC Tool posted here: viewtopic.php?f=23&t=18725 - is there a later version of that tool?

Anyway, I tried that tool on the latest version of BIOS for my board and when I flashed her, I F'd up my bios, she wouldn't boot up anymore. I was fortunate to find that the boot block was still okay and was able to use a recovery usb stick to upload and restore back to the manufacturer's latest BIOS for this board.

I tried the whole process again and did a reflash straight from DOS and the same thing happened (and I was able to recover again using the same method). It would appear I can just keep flashing crap bios' to my board and reflashing back to the manufacturer bios to get it working again as long as I make sure not to flash to boot block and keep that in-tact for backup.

So anyway, this AMI Tool in the post above is not working with my BIOS (which can be found here: http://www.foxconnchannel.com/support/d ... -us0002263). I currently am running my mobo off this version of the bios, unmodded.

When I use the AMI SLIC Tool, it appears to work correctly, the green boxes light up, indicating success and I even opened up the bios with MMTool and checked it out and it appears to be in-tact but like I said, I'm totally new at this and I don't know what kind of things to look for in that tool.

From what I understand, the bios is made up of a bunch of modules and the SLIC is just another module, correct? All the SLIC Tool does is execute commands on AMIMMDOS program to insert an SLIC module into the Foxconn ROM.

I've been attempting to do this manually using AMI's MMTool but I don't have a clue what I'm doing. I load the ROM with is, load the module file, set it to uncompressed and just hit Insert. I probably have to enter other values like the Module ID, Offset, etc, etc, but I don't have a clue what those values should be, I also don't know if this method will even work.

Perhaps someone with more experience can explain if I'm on the right track and how I should proceed. Also if someone has the know how and time, feel free to mod the ROM yourself and upload it for me to download from somewhere so I can get my Vista activated but I am quite interested in figuring out how to be able to do this myself. It'd be nice to be able to patch future updates of the BIOS and be able to patch other BIOS's manually.

As stated I have AMI's MMTool (v3.22), AMIMMDOS (v1.10), AMIBCP (v3.13). Don't know of I need any other tools. Also, anyone know some kind of BIOS simulator (does such a thing exist) that I could perhaps use to flash to a virtual BIOS to test these mods out to make sure they actually work before flashing it to my main system chip?

Any help, much appreciated.

Edit: I just realized I also may have posted this in the wrong section, perhaps it can be moved to the Activation board by some moderator if this is not the right place to post this?