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!
2 comments:
I too have found Igor's patch to enable VT. My problem is I have never patched a BIOS before and I am having troubles figuring out how to run this patch. I created a DOS boot cd but I do not know how to access the folder in which the executable file exist. If you have a few minutes to spare I would love to hear how you accomplished running this patch. Thanks in advance!
A DOS boot cd makes things a little harder. I assume you used a ready built iso image for the DOS cd? You need to copy the stuff for the patch onto the cd (i.e. modify the iso image before burning). Or you use the easy way and create a bootable DOS USB drive. Just find one of the USB "images" for DOS on the web. Once you have the bootable USB drive copy the patch files onto it and boot off the USB drive. After that follow the instructions on Igor's site.
You may want to google for ultimate boot cd (UBCD) which includes several bootable operating systems including DOS. It comes with a little script to "burn" the image onto an USB drive. I remember it also allows you to put additional stuff onto the USB drive (in our case the patch files) which you can use once you booted into DOS.
Hope this helps.
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