Ideapad Y730 Intel VT support [ Edited ]

[Transporter1997]

Hi!

What about new BIOS with enabled Intel VT for my Lenovo IdeaPad Y730?

Last week Lenovo published Insyde H2O BIOS for U330 with VT support. ReadMe file 0FCN67WW.txt for this BIOS contents a phrase:

" This package updates the basic input/output system (BIOS) on Ideapad Y730, Y330, U330. ... "

 But there is no new BIOS for Y730 on customer support site.  Dear lenovo, when ???

[Transporter1997]

Anybody home answer?

[Transporter1997]

Still quiet .. quiet...

... pam pam pam ...

...agent Molder where are you? It's your challenge ... UFO stolen my new BIOS ...

[felixthemighty]

how about Y450...

shhh why lenovo didn't aware about this VT things.

It should to be made standart for all laptops... just like blue tooth and wifi.

[Mark_Lenovo Administrator]

Transporter1997,

Thanks for the lighthearted approach here!

So many flames here at times, and a bit of humor from members really brightens up my day! 

Honestly, the official position for the existing IdeaPad line was "No support for VT" and I had communicated that in other threads including the U330 and Y550 discussions - this was understandably not well received by many.

I had been following the VT discussions with some interest as several members worked on BIOS hacks to enable - apparently with some success on the U330.  I was then somewhat surprised when our release of  BIOS 67 prominently featured VT support.  

We have been sharing customer feedback  about the desire for VT with development and I don't know that the official position has changed despite this exception on the U330, but we can continue to beat the drum and see what happens. 

Sorry for the delayed response - it has been a challenging week.

Best regards,

Mark

[smoothrod]

Same problem as everyone else, processor capable but the bios will not let me enable virtualization for XP mode.  Is there a work around for the y730?  I see the y550 guys have it worked out.   Thanks

[middleton]

You have InsydeH2O-based BIOS in your laptop. For this type of BIOS solution already exists. You should carefully read links one and two.

[Mark_Lenovo Administrator]

Admin edit - changed thread / reply titles and removed several replies that had to do with changing the name of the thread - since this has been restored to focus on Y730 - that part of the conversation is now irrelevant.

No fault or issue here - just some clean up.

[adhemar]

I have finally been able to enable hardware virtualization (VT) on my Lenovo Y730, thanks first and foremost to Marcan's blog entry and all the people that participated in his thread and in the U330 one.

Before I go into some details, a couple of warnings:

• There is no guarantee the script I used will work for your laptop (mine has a P8400 CPU and a 64-bit Windows).
• The patch is not for the faint of heart. It may destroy your laptop if you make a mistake.

To truly know what is going on, the two above threads must be read and understood. It’s lots of reading and it’s rather confusing. The short of it is that to enable VT on a computer using the Insyde H20 bios one needs to:

• Confirm that your CPU supports VT.
• Dump your bios (cannot use anybody else’s or Lenovo’s).
• Patch the VT flag (and check sum) on the dumped bios.
• Verify the patch.
• Flash back the patched bios.

Step #3 is model specific. As it turns out the VSS and VT flag offsets of the Y730 are the same as the ones on the U330:

VSS_OFFSET = 0x0030048

VSS_SIZE = 0x4000 - 0x48

PATCH_OFFSET = 0x1af

PATCH_VALUE = 0x01

PATCH_VARIABLE = u"Setup"

With this and Marcan’s vtenable.py script  - you can enable the VT setting.

I will provide more details in separate posts. In the meantime most of the tools I used are available there.

[adhemar]

Here are additional details on the steps I followed to update my Y730 bios. They are all available on the net, buried into multiple threads. I have chosen to describe only steps that can be performed under Windows; there are other ways to perform them.

First go to Intel and make sure your CPU supports VT. If it doesn’t then there is unfortunately nothing that can be enabled.

Second, dump your bios. Under Windows, I used the InsydeFlash.exe that comes with Lenovo’s BIOS updates. You can get my copy there or you can extract it yourself as follows:

• Download the one and unique Y730 BIOS update from Lenovo site. Run it but don’t flash.
• Search your C drive and find the directory in which InsydeFlash.exe has been unpacked (making sure you’re searching for hidden files and directories). Work from there or copy the whole directory to a more convenient location.
• In that directory, edit platform.ini. Search Ini-Section “[FDFile]” and set the value “BackupName” to any desired filename, for instance original-bios.fd.
• Execute InsydeFlash.exe again without flashing. It will dump your bios in the current directory under the specified “BackupName”.

Third, patch your dumped bios with a python script:

• In order to run the script, you must have Python 2.5 – not 3.0 – installed on your computer (Portable Python  is easy to install and lightweight).
• My script, based on Marcan’s vtenable.py and modified for the Y730, is available there.
• To run it, open a DOS command box, cd to the directory containing you extracted bios and type something like D:\PortablePython_1.1_py2.5.4\App\python vtenable-Y730.py original-bios.fd patched-bios.fd. The vtEnable-Y730.py script reads the original-bios (dumped) file from the first file name, modifies it and write a patched bios to the second file name.
• Don’t use the patched file if you get any error. Find out what’s going on.

Four, verify the patch by comparing the original and modified bios files, using a binary diff tool (I used vBinDiff under Windows, in a DOS box). Quoting Marcan, Only two or three bytes should change: one or two adjacent bytes for the checksum (they should be decremented by one when you look at them as a 16-bit unsigned integer), and the VT enable byte should change from 00 to 01. Right after the checksum bytes you should be able to see the Setup name in UTF-16 (something like S.e.t.u.p.). Don’t use the patched file if you see unexpected changes.

Five, go back to insydeFlash and update your bios:

• Edit platform.ini. Search Ini-Section “[FDFile]” and set the value “FileName” to the desired patched file, for instance patched-bios.fd. Search section “[ForceFlash]” and set the value of “all” to 1 (all other variables should be set to 0).  Then search section “[VARIABLE]” and set “Flag” to 0.
• The platform.ini I used is available there.
• Execute InsydeFlash.exe again and, this time, answer yes to the prompt to flash. Cross your fingers and let the system do its thing and reboot.