Hi,
Please notify me if this question is not appropriate.
I bought, totally on purpose a HP Elitebook 255 G9 with no OS. I do have a few Windows licence keys lying around and wanted to adventure a key into this bios.
What I do know:
A Windows licence follows this same sting of hex numbers in every bios: 01 00 00 00 00 00 00 00 01 00 00 00 00 00 00 00 1D 00 00 00
The dump of the HP 255 G9 does not have this string.
My guess is that Windows activation looks for named string and checks the licence key behind it. (please correct me if I'm wrong, I'm learning).
The bioses I checked with uefi tool did have the key in the BIOS region in the third padding.
The bios of the HP 255 G9 seems to have the complete BIOS region in the root. There's no ME region and no discriptor region. Only what looks like the content of the BIOS region.
I calculated the start offset of the third padding in my bios and injected the hex code followed by the licence key i want in it. I did overwrite the 0xFFs rather than inserting the codes and shifting the rest. So everything after this is still on the same offset and the file still has the same size.
The laptop warned me of a crc error in the cmos. This did not surprise me. After installing windows and rebooting where necessary this warning did not return.
It didn't surprise me either that the laptop did not find the licence key in the bios. It was more experimenting than knowledge.
Still I'd like to know whether it is possible to inject a key into a bios that does not hold one, how to calculate the place where that should be done in stead of guesses, and most of all if I'm allowed to ask for help on this subject here.
For reference I embedded the vanilla bios of the laptop. In my modded bios I injected the code on offset 0x700000, which by my calculation is the start of the third padding.
I do not expect serial numbers et cetera are needed for this question, but if they're required I do have them.
Please notify me if this question is not appropriate.
I bought, totally on purpose a HP Elitebook 255 G9 with no OS. I do have a few Windows licence keys lying around and wanted to adventure a key into this bios.
What I do know:
A Windows licence follows this same sting of hex numbers in every bios: 01 00 00 00 00 00 00 00 01 00 00 00 00 00 00 00 1D 00 00 00
The dump of the HP 255 G9 does not have this string.
My guess is that Windows activation looks for named string and checks the licence key behind it. (please correct me if I'm wrong, I'm learning).
The bioses I checked with uefi tool did have the key in the BIOS region in the third padding.
The bios of the HP 255 G9 seems to have the complete BIOS region in the root. There's no ME region and no discriptor region. Only what looks like the content of the BIOS region.
I calculated the start offset of the third padding in my bios and injected the hex code followed by the licence key i want in it. I did overwrite the 0xFFs rather than inserting the codes and shifting the rest. So everything after this is still on the same offset and the file still has the same size.
The laptop warned me of a crc error in the cmos. This did not surprise me. After installing windows and rebooting where necessary this warning did not return.
It didn't surprise me either that the laptop did not find the licence key in the bios. It was more experimenting than knowledge.
Still I'd like to know whether it is possible to inject a key into a bios that does not hold one, how to calculate the place where that should be done in stead of guesses, and most of all if I'm allowed to ask for help on this subject here.
For reference I embedded the vanilla bios of the laptop. In my modded bios I injected the code on offset 0x700000, which by my calculation is the start of the third padding.
I do not expect serial numbers et cetera are needed for this question, but if they're required I do have them.