Hack Your Computer's BIOS to Unlock Hidden Settings, Overclocking & More

Dec 21, 2011 08:24 PM

Your BIOS, or Basic Input Output System, is the firmware on your motherboard responsible for initializing your computer's hardware when it is first powered on. It probes for video adapters, RAM, the whole works. The BIOS provides a small library of basic input/output functions used to operate and control the peripherals such as the keyboard, text display functions and so forth, and these software library functions are callable by external software such as the OS and system software within said OS.

When you enter your BIOS, the BIOS settings allow us to manipulate devices in the computer to do some pretty cool things. We can overclock parts, create RAID arrays, add boot passwords and much more. By default, most manufacturers don't allow you to have many settings, especially if you're a laptop user (gaming laptop users excluded). This can really be a bummer, especially when you're really close to running a game perfectly and your hardware can't handle it, overclocking can be that final boost that you need. Even if overclocking isn't your thing, you can downclock to save power.

Having a great BIOS allows users to do great things, but as we've said, a lot of computers lack this. The Null Byte alternative is to hack it! If we hack our BIOS, we can give our computer features it may not have even had before, like USB booting. Note that not all BIOS have hacked versions available.

Requirements

Windows OS
Know your BIOS name and version or computer model

Warning

You may brick your computer's motherboard if you flash incorrectly or an error occurs, rendering it unusable. Don't turn your computer off, or do anything else during a flash.

Find the Right Hacked BIOS for You

To find our BIOS, take the name of it and use relevant queries. I'll be looking for a hacked A05 BIOS for an Alienware M18x.

Head to Bios Mods. If you can't find it here, do a simple Google search. I used "hacked m18x bios a05" , which returned a lovely unlocked A05 BIOS.
Search for your BIOS, computer model, or both.

Flash the BIOS

Turn off all of the running software that you can. Having software running can cause a bad flash, which will brick your motherboard.
Extract the utility archive.
Load up the tool and pick your cracked BIOS version if necessary.
Wait for the flash to complete.

When you reboot, you should have a BIOS with a plethora of new options like the example below.