Hello everyone. Hope you are well.
So… I have struggled with trying to bring back the option to have the AOD debug menu visible in the BIOS on this device. I’ve tried (as far as I found in forums around here) everything that should have unlocked the feature, but all it caused was a soft-brick (black screen - fan spin) with no way to verify if it worked…
What I found interesting is that the drivers were present in bios version 3.00, but removed in version 3.06. I’ve tried adding them back in, but it always boots to black screen (had to resuscitate the board using a CH341a programmer with WSON8 pogo pins to get it to work normally again.) I’ve used UEFITool and the M&MTool (I know ami caused issues here before so I’m trying to refer to it in a different way to avoid that.), and the UEFI Editor to try and have the menu pop back up again, but no luck sadly.
If anybody could please help with this, I would be very grateful. Here’s the bios files below. If you’re interested to read further below the files, you can do so if you’d like. I will just include the issues I faced because I would like to learn what went wrong. This is by far the riskiest and most involved bios mod I’ve ever done. The last one was simply undervolting the xps 7590, which isn’t as difficult as this…
Edit: I can add more than 2 links now! I will provide the modifications I have done below, for reference. Maybe someone is interested to see what I did wrong.
Thank you in advance
Original Ver 3.00
G1618-04.rom
Original Ver 3.06
G1618-04_V3.06.rom
Modified Ver 3.06 (first attempt using UEFITool 028.0)
G1618-04_V3.06_MOD.rom
Modified Ver 3.06-2 (second attempt using M&MTool 5.0.2.0025)
G1618-04_V3.06-2.rom
Issues:
M&MTool version 4.5.0.23:
Did not display the embedded fs properly, and was missing a lot of things.
M&MTool version 5.0.2.0025
Was fine, and even inserted the modules at the end of the bios, but still caused a boot to black screen. (despite being the “official” way of modifying the bios, which I found odd?)
UEFITool 0.28.0 (The version that still allows modifying bios files afaik)
Correctly inserted everything into the bios (even checking the padding files - they were left unchanged.) Still caused a boot to black screen with fan spin… I say correctly because I opened the modified bios using the M&MTool, and it displayed it fine with the changes made intact. I did insert them at the locations they were found in V 3.00, instead of at the end, so that might have been what caused the issue, but I am not 100% on that… It did not display the other volumes that existed in the bios though, so I wasn’t able to insert other missing drivers
P.S. I found it odd that the newest UEFITool shows other volumes that exist within the bios that are not visible to any leaked versions of M&MTool and the UEFITool 0.28.0. I think that may be where the issue is, but I don’t really know how I would go about adding the removed drivers back in if the FS is not even visible, and the newer versions of UEFITool do not permit editing…
P.P.S - I would like to also find out how to add other features that were removed by the folks at GPD (great move guys. Definitely did not spend a good chunk of money on this thing, only for it to be gimped at production stage ). There were other features such as adjustable TDP, and fan control that I’d like to add back in as well. Not much of a deal-breaker, but would be fantastic to add in as well. If there is a way to also improve the abysmal USB4 hot-plugging on this thing(have to be inserted while the device is dead. Like what is even the point of it being hot-plugging then?!), I would be truly grateful.
Edit by Fernando: Thread title shortened