I’ve tried to follow the instructions given in [2], but when I try to load my BIOS file from Dell (R440-021701C.cap) into UEFITool, it fails with
FfsParser::parse: not a single Volume Top File is found, the image may be corrupted
so I’m kinda stuck at the modding step in the instructions.
Thanks in advance to anyone willing to help!
Note: in my best attempt to spam the Internet for help on this, I’ve crossposted here (new user link spam limit) bios-mods dot com/forum/Thread-Dell-R440-server-Resizable-BAR-mod
@Kuri0 Do you have a recommended download link for MMTool? Everything I see looks really sketchy. Who publishes the tool? Hopefully someone who has done this successfully by modding a dell DUP exe (dell update package) bios package can chime in to let us know the details of how they did it.
best ways is read bios chip with external programmer.
on r440 there should be a service mode jumper. after making server in service mode u can use fpt to backup ur bios and then read it with uefitool (0.28 or if it give error try 0.25) after u read and u dont have much error u can modify it.
before all that best way to be sure u can restore bios is to read it with external programmer and save ur full bios. read and then save it.
i have done that with my server so if i make some mistake i can always go back to a working state.
other option is fine someone that had ur same pc as u and alreaddy did the trick
@Scruffy Thanks! Do I understand you correctly, that you’re saying there are two ways to do this?
A) With an external programmer, and this is safer because you can flash back your original bios if you make a mistake.
and
B) With some software called “FPT,” but I have to put the board in service mode with a jumper before that method will work
yes, you could flash original latest bios, then dump using a programmer so that if we mod your bios, its the bios that you dumped instead of clean bios.
for intel fpt, any sort of bios security (like using jumper for service mode) must be disabled in order to use it for write/dump the entire bios chip.
Though there must be a way to do this without the jumper and purely with software because I don’t need to touch a jumper to update the stock bios and I can do that just from my mouse and keyboard
@Koekieezz Is dumping the actual contents of my bios chip strictly necessary here though? I have the factory bios binary. I should be able to mod it with the rebar mod and flash it just like how the factory standard bios upgrade goes, right?
I’m right now running the bios from the installer package I gave in the first link at the top of the post. I recently upgraded with that package. So the bios I need to modify has to be in there somewhere, right?
well yeah, you need to dump the bios you just flashed (i suppose this is the latest feb 2023 ver), and see if uefitool would read it. since the cap/bin file from dell website couldnt do it.
Delete the first 0xA8 bytes (Capsule 0x54, $RBU 0x54) and you’ll get an LZMA stream which you can decompress with 7-zip. The resulting file usually starts with another $RBU 0x54 header followed by 2 Intel SPI images. You’ll need to split them manually, after removing some small junk in between.
Does anyone know where I can find the right FPT tool for my platform?
Looks like the FPT tool I need is in the SPS v4 ME system tools package (SPS for Server Platform Services because my mobo is server, not consumer grade). I can’t seem to find that anywhere though. I have found a few times around the forums where people have posted download links to it but they’re all dead now :-/
