Monday, March 16, 2009

Thanks Igor (or how to get VT-x on a Sony notebook)

I already ranted about Sony disabling VT-x in all notebooks (except for the BZ line). They also don't want to release a BIOS were one could actually change settings other than boot device order. There have been tutorials about patching the NVRAM on models with a phoenix bios for quite some time. Unfortunately mine uses an UEFI based AMI Aptio bios so until now I was out of luck.
Checking for news on this issue again I came across a thread in an notebook related forum. That guy - Igor (an Intel Black Belt btw) - did an awesome job of reverse engineering on the bios structure and came up with a program that utilizes AMI's afudos to first dump the current bios, parse the resulting file for the pattern which disable VT-x, patch that to something more desirable ;-) and use afudos again to write back the patch bios image.
The challenge was to get a DOS bootdisk onto the usb pendrive, the rest worked just like a charm.
You can also go to his website directly and visit the download section.
Just phantastic work. For me it's now off to play xVM with hvms on the notebook!
Thanks a lot Igor!