Is it possible to modify SecureCore Tiano BIOS of Dell Laptop

[Mr. Anderson]

I made this thread to figure out easy way of modding SecureCore Tiano BIOS of Dell laptop. I had found some tools which can read the bios but does not provide any modification or changes rights. I had seen on some forums, there are users who had successfully modified other bios and I hope this might be also possible. Anyhow what I found right now that there is no way to mod this one. So first thing I need to ensure that how to find a way to boot in GPT disk in EFI mode. Did anyone succeeded in this.

[Quasim]

I found certain resources on web who had able to edit this bios. I cannot give you really advance information on this, but a minor can put highlights on the process. What I found that the UEFI bios consist of around four different files. They are the bios.wph file, the recovery one, one belongs to oem and other is some slp20.pfae file. So here the wph file is the what plays the important role. There is no way to find any tool that can unpack or assemble it. In simple words there is no editor for that. You need really powerful tool to modify such bios and make changes to the system. Because of anything is done wrong, either your bios will be dead or some features will be disabled. And you have to begin back from the recovery part. First it is always recommended that you must have a backup of your existing bios. There are tools like Universal Bios Backup Toolkit which helps to copy the bios file and keep it safe somewhere. So in case if there is any crash or tragedy you can restore it with ease and get back to your system. I am here not really sure how to mod UEFI bios, but surely there will be way for the same. One more thing I want to inform you before going for this kind of stuff.

Anyhow if you are using a bios backup tool, there are chances that it will not backup the entire bios. As there are certain recent modification in bios files. So some of this changes are not properly tracked and are left. So if you restore there is no 100% surety that your system will work fine. There are chances of failure also. I will recommend you to wait for sometime so that in future we can find some better tools like this.

[Geniee]

I remember I use Award BIOS Editor to modify my old board bios. I just need to enable widescreen support on that which was not by default in the bios. That has worked mostly. But about UEFI there is still lot of pending stuff to be released in market.

[jamiejohn]

I will like to provide info on SecureCore Tiano bios design. This might help someone here to give more appropriate solution for bios modding. Now SecureCore Tiano is a solution which is made to meed the uefi market requirements. This includes many things. UEFI is usually introduce to provide a source code so that there can be easy development in the market. This helps the OEMs to create more appropriate solutions for their consumers. On the other hand there is major changes in the boot speed. In older systems any slow hardware connected to the system usually increases or hampers the boot time, which is simply removed or eliminated by this. To decrease boot time UEFI works a bit differently. Like if a hard drive consume long time to response the bios check another device and then revert back.

Compared to regular this is much more reliable and secure. Encryption is something more benefited from uefi. If we talk all this in account, then you can assume that if you modify this you might loss of the features. The entire source code is different and needs a advance editor to initiate properly.

[sushantbankar]

What I know till now that there is no modded bios version available. There is nothing much you can do here. We need to wait until there is any too released which can help to customize this bios as per need.

[Arun K]

I can explain the bios architecture in detail. I hope that this can also help here. There are people who can generate such mods. The bios architecture is another important thing to understand in-order to generate a mod. Anyhow there are rare cases you will find custom mods for any current version. So waiting is the best option. I will explain the architecture here which might help us to come on common conclusion. The foundation lies on EDK1 and EDK2 where EDK1 is applied with certain patches. The comes the kernel. This is usually designed by Phoenix and there is no leaked information no it. I tried to located the actual version here, but unluckily there are rare discussion done on it. The other layer now consist of more Phoenix new innovations. Nothing yet clearly mentioned what this part comes with. There is Si modules from SV, Phoenix platform module, excel board lib and oem board module. Then comes the system. With has Tiano and phoenix pei, dxe, bds drivers, oem plug-ins and efi plug-ins. Here the bottom two layer are something which are needed to be understand. I even tried to find separate tool for each of them, but there is nothing much mentioned. The technical datasheet of this also does not provide any detailed highlights.

[Pamina]

I am not sure but there is a Phoenix UEFI BIOS Editor. This tool is not tested completely, but soon it is going to be available. There is less information available on it. I found something on this on a download site. This is developed by Phoenix Technologies. There is a 1.0 version also available for that. I had not really tried to find it. The program is a .exe file which can be run in Windows and you can do some research on the bios. Surely there is a great difference between different bios provided by different brand. Like for example Intel gives a full datasheet on its uefi bios. This gives each and every detail. This is very much helpful for those who are modding a bios. I do not know how much this can help for SecureCore Tiano.