MSI G-Series Unlocked BIOS

[Hanreesh Sanghera]

Hello, would a custom bios for msi GT640 help my bios detect a SSD I just installed?

Thanks in advance

[svl7]

You probably need to allocate a drive letter to it, that's a common issue with some drives (e.g. OCZ).

[Nebbors]

Just tried the currrent GT60 bios, works good, but missing ram settings.

[frisianbear]

If someone uploads me the 16F3 BIOS without a password I will unlock it for you.

______________________________________________________________________________________________________________________________________________________________

MS-1762 w/ XMP stuff, Vt-d, etc is finished. Need testers for the MS-1762 barebone. Send me a PM if you are interested. If this is confirmed working, then I will work on GT60 and GT70 notebooks.

Also, 3rd-gen MSI-G with XM CPU can OC via multipliers!

Another point: any GE60 / GE70 people interested?

______________________________________________________________________________________________________________________________________________________________

FYI -- Thanks guys, appreciate all the good words you put in.

Just as a reminder for next time, if you like my work just hit the 'Thanks button' on the bottom left of the post. Most of these 'thanks posts' will be deleted as it makes finding relevant information about troubleshooting and discussing the BIOS more difficult. Some of you are using it to bump your post counts so that you can reach five posts faster. Warning: this will not be tolerated. Your posts will be deleted and you will be handed an infraction.

P.S.: You also don't have to tell me when you are going to flash the BIOS. Tell me when you do it, I love feedback. You don't have to tell me you're about to do it; that's completely unnecessary. Those posts will be cleaned up as well, especially if you are below the 5 post count. Senior members/Elite members don't worry. This is mostly for the newcomers. Thanks.

Hi Xonar how do you mean a BIOS with password are they locked orsomething ? maybe a noob quistion , otherwise i will see if i can find 1 for the 16F3.

[Xonar]

Hi Frisianbear,

BIOS password, means exactly that; It's a password required to enter the BIOS. If you put the password in correctly, it takes you into the BIOS just like normally. But if you answer it a certain amount of times wrong, then your notebook won't boot past POST (The notebook locks you out of Windows) and you will have to reset the CMOS.

Typically, I try to get BIOS files off manufacturer's websites. In MSI's case though, they don't publicly update their whitebook BIOS, so my next option is to have someone with the notebook extract their current BIOS and upload it. Problem is though, if they set a password on the BIOS, then the password is extracted with the BIOS which can be a problem.

You can use universal BIOS backup tool to extract the CURRENT BIOS you are using. Universal BIOS Backup ToolKit 2.0.zip

For anyone who is requesting a BIOS, please follow these directions:

Make sure all BIOS passwords have been cleared and that all settings within the BIOS are at their default states (i.e. nothing has been altered, even the boot order, etc).

In Universal BIOS Backup, hit 'Read' and after that is done, hit 'Backup'.

Zip up the file and send it over my way.

[Dakneo]

Hi Xonar, Thanks for the work u do here. Just flashed a GX740 ( MSI ) notebook with your above bios and there's definitely some additional advanced bios options displayed. Unfortunately, it doesn't look like there's any tweaking associated with memory , which is what I was really looking for. Is this the only BIOS available for the GX740 ? Thanks ! - Dak

[Xonar]

Thank you for reporting this to me. I'll take a look and tell you what I find.

I'll have a new one up in one to two days.

Thanks much!

[Dakneo]

Whoa man. Rocket like response. Thanks so much & have a good one !

[Xonar]

@Dakneo -

Have you looked at:

Chipset -> North Bridge Configuration -> Clarksfield_Lynnfield MRC/QPI ?

Let me know if you those chapters do not exist.

[Dakneo]

Hi Xonar,

Odd. There's no Chipset option under Advanced and I checked all the sub menu's listed. This is BIOS .10F from 05/27/2011

[Xonar]

@Dakneo

Thanks for the screenshot. I've updated the first post with another unlock. I'm not too hopefully that this new one will unlock the chipset tab, but it's worth a shot. I'll keep you posted if I figure something out.

[Dakneo]

Sure appreciate the effort Xonar. I'll give this new one a shot. Have a good one & thnx again.

[jay0r]

Im a owner of a Medion X7811 i hope im soon able to test your GX740 Bios but first i need permission from some administrator or Mod

Edit:

I just flashed the bios and alot of new options are available now, but there are no settings for the Chipset

Is there a way to enable those too, because i wanted to change my RAM ?!

[Unhumanje]

Is there a way to fix the syslinux boot error with this (gx740)? Also this 5 posts limit is annoying :/

[Xonar]

I have never encountered or heard of such an issue.

[rycyve]

Are these files included (AFUDOS.exe and update.bat) in the zip file that is downloadable in the first post?

[Xonar]

yes, afudos.exe, update.bat, readme.txt and the ROM are all in the zip.

[rycyve]

First of all thanks for Xonar unlocking the MSI G-series notebooks bios. Bios works but there are some buts. Load of functions arent working, for example changing CPU Turbo mode on or off doesnt change anything. It is unknown what values to put in bios for ex: power values (volts or watts? there are no dots). What really bothers me that under the CPU Information submenu theres Base Frequency that is 133 mhz, is it BCLK? From my understanding BCLK should be 100 mhz.

[Unhumanje]

I have never encountered or heard of such an issue.

I have a few flash drives - I've tried installing a few different OS-es or tools via unetbootin and XBOOT which use syslinux as bootloader, and it never works. BIOS returns Boot Error. However, anything with a GRUB boot loader works

I haven't yet discovered how to fix this.

[Xonar]

First of all thanks for Xonar unlocking the MSI G-series notebooks bios. Bios works but there are some buts. Load of functions arent working, for example changing CPU Turbo mode on or off doesnt change anything. It is unknown what values to put in bios for ex: power values (volts or watts? there are no dots). What really bothers me that under the CPU Information submenu theres Base Frequency that is 133 mhz, is it BCLK? From my understanding BCLK should be 100 mhz.

First off, which notebook are you using? Power values depend on what you are changing....TDP is measured in watts, etc... BCLK is DIV2S, it is set to 100 automatically for Sandy Bridge, for Arrendale it's 133mhz I think. All functions work as intended.

@Unhumanje , maybe @chmod1337 can help you. I have minimal Linux experience.

[chmod1337]

Well, I haven't heard of such an issue before, but I had troubles with such tolls as YUMI, Xboot or unetbootin. The problems usually arised, because the pendrives wouldn't boot at all or because the installers didn't preserve the folder structures exactly, which lead to problems during the installation.

In the past I switched to a somewhat different installation procedure, which unfortunately isn't suported by all computers.

You can write an 1:1 copy of an cdrom iso onto a pendrive with dd (if you don't know dd, it is a tool for low level copying) and most computers will boot it just fine.

dd if=/path/to/your/file.iso of=/dev/sdx

x being the letter of your usb pendrive and NOT your harddrive, you can also append bs=10M for bigger than default blocksize, for increased speed.

If you are running Windows and no GNU/Linux, you need to get dd first (and you might want to add it you your systems path variable). You can get it with the Unix tools for Windows or Cygwin, both worked for me.

PS: If you find out what really caused your problems, I'd be glad to hear from you.

[Unhumanje]

Well, I haven't heard of such an issue before, but I had troubles with such tolls as YUMI, Xboot or unetbootin. The problems usually arised, because the pendrives wouldn't boot at all or because the installers didn't preserve the folder structures exactly, which lead to problems during the installation.

In the past I switched to a somewhat different installation procedure, which unfortunately isn't suported by all computers.

You can write an 1:1 copy of an cdrom iso onto a pendrive with dd (if you don't know dd, it is a tool for low level copying) and most computers will boot it just fine.

x being the letter of your usb pendrive and NOT your harddrive, you can also append bs=10M for bigger than default blocksize, for increased speed.

If you are running Windows and no GNU/Linux, you need to get dd first (and you might want to add it you your systems path variable). You can get it with the Unix tools for Windows or Cygwin, both worked for me.

PS: If you find out what really caused your problems, I'd be glad to hear from you.

I will try this out, but that doesn't solve my problem entirely. This way I can only have 1 OS per pendrive, and my initial intentions were to have several OSes and Tools on a single pendrive, by using XBoot for example (I've tried YUMI as well). What lead me to believe that the BIOS is the problem is that:

1) Once the drive is successfully populated with tools/OSes - qemu runs it under windows and it shows the syslinux bootloader and everything works. However, while running physically - BIOS returns Boot error.

2) A few other people with the same laptop (and bios) reporting similar problems.

Effectively, I think there is some incompatibility between the BIOS and Syslinux

[netsky123]

Hi

This is the latest BIOS for Rabook F640(or call it msi-16f3) Downlosd URL

I'm interested become a tester of the latest unlocked BIOS.Because now I'm still using 30E version(but some software say it is 30A version) unlocked BIOS.

BTW,I found someone tried 7970m on 16f3,but doesn't work,system only running on intel hd graphics.I wonder if the BIOS doesn't support AMD Enduro,or just because the AMD's terrible drivers?

p.s:sorry for my poor english

[chmod1337]

As I already said in my previous post, it is not a good idea to put different OSes and Tools onto the same USB drive, because in doing so, YUMI and other tools have to move the files to seperate folders in order to prevent name collisions. But doing so breaks routines with hard coded paths and you won't know about that until you are halfway through the installation process.

If you really want to have multiple OSes an Tools on a single pendrive, you can still partition it and install a bootmanager like grub4dos. But then again why not get a couple of smaller usb drives? This is probably even more cost effective.

PS: this really sounds like a bios problem to me. But it is kind of akward, because I was under the impression that as long as there is some magic boot sequence on the drive the bios will (try to) boot it. Have you tried to booting the pendrive on another PC, not just Qemu?

[Unhumanje]

As I already said in my previous post, it is not a good idea to put different OSes and Tools onto the same USB drive, because in doing so, YUMI and other tools have to move the files to seperate folders in order to prevent name collisions. But doing so breaks routines with hard coded paths and you won't know about that until you are halfway through the installation process.

If you really want to have multiple OSes an Tools on a single pendrive, you can still partition it and install a bootmanager like grub4dos. But then again why not get a couple of smaller usb drives? This is probably even more cost effective.

PS: this really sounds like a bios problem to me. But it is kind of akward, because I was under the impression that as long as there is some magic boot sequence on the drive the bios will (try to) boot it. Have you tried to booting the pendrive on another PC, not just Qemu?

Yes - it works on other laptops. I'm making some progress though - I now believe that it is indeed a BIOS problem, but not with syslinux, but with the way the flash drives are formatted - logical/primary and actually in which sector the syslinux.cfg and other menu files are written at... I did a complete flash drive wipe - DDoD 5220.22.-M (3 passes) - formatted to fat32 primary - and manually moved the files required, but moved syslinux.cfg and the menu files first - and now it booted ...

Three things to consider:

1) Full wipe

2) Must be a PRIMARY partition, formatted in fat32(obvious)

3) The required syslinux/multiboot files must be written in very early - in one of the first sectors

Not really sure how this works, but as said, without doing this, the flash drive works on other PC's, but not on this one (so this BIOS).