I purchased a Toshiba A350 laptop before the holidays as my old one finally bit the dust. I did quite a bit of research before taking the plunge - but I apparently overlooked something I really could use.
The model laptop I have is A350-00X (PSAL6C-00X015)
http://www.toshiba.ca/web/
This laptop is 64 bit and capable of 8GB of RAM. I run a lot of Virtual Machines for testing and assisting others and wanted to finally be able to run 64-bit guests (something I couldn't do before).
Well...I didn't read things carefully enough. Although everything I can find tells me this laptop should support Intel VT technology, Toshiba in their infinite wisdom (and masked BIOS) have chosen NOT to provide any way to turn on VT. Why would anyone buy this kind of power and NOT run Virtualization on it?? What are they thinking about?
Anyway....I've been researching BIOS mods to see if I can take the latest release (1.70) BIOS and open it up to enable the VMX bits so that I have working 64-bit guest support.
If anyone here can help me successfully enable the VMX bits (preferably by giving me an entry in the BIOS screens to toggle it on or off) I will personally donate a full, legal, sealed version of Vista Ultimate to them.
I need this to be done without bricking my box.
Any takers??
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I think they only offer up the latest BIOS for whatever you're using. In my case, they'd likely recommend the version I'm running now. I don't think they're into modding.
The last time I checked with Phoenix, they basically told me that Toshiba BIOS is highly modified from the base Phoenix BIOS and they wouldn't offer anything. I see that's the online scanner they use too.
Thanks!
To correctly mod your bios, you'd need to get a bios programmer. For Phoenix Bios' you use Phoenix BIOS Editor. You'll also need some documentation...
This will be a very tricky mod, since the only real way to test the bios is to flash your bios chip, but if you do a bad flash, its hooped.
You might want to look into JTAG, and see if your Motherboard has a JTAG port. You may be able to reflash the bios this way....
Have a look here for information about the BIOS editor: http://www.wimsbios.com/ph
As for the JTAG port, here is some information, and you can atleast get an idea of what it looks like... http://ymorin.is-a-geek.or
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by: dbruntonPosted on 2009-01-10 at 11:44:09ID: 23344972
You could try these guys.
http://biosagentplus.com/