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I’m happy to announce that Windows 7 x64 has finally been given the green light around here. As a candidate for dual booting with XP x86 or even on its own. My previous (sleep-related) gripes were resolved through much experimentation:
- Screen resolution coming out of sleep (S3) reverting to 1024×768 60Hz: SOLVED!
- SLIC 2.1 bios activation hack wouldn’t flash properly or stick when coming out of sleep (S3), showing SLIC 2.0: SOLVED!
The screen thing kind of solved itself when playing around with the graphics settings. I turned off the "Hide Modes that this monitor cannot display" checkbox and then upon exiting sleep the next time I manually set the resolution and refresh. After that I even installed Catalyst but it seems to have stuck perfectly. I now also know for sure why this condition developed. Experimentation showed that it was indeed my master-slave switch that causes an obvious delay in turning on the monitor, thus not providing the OS with EDID. Lucky, since I was just moments away from taking out the pliers (EDID hack).
The SLIC bios hack proved to more of a challenge by comparison. I had previously installed W7 two or three times, always with different versions, but never gotten it to work. I had flashed the bios numerous times, including once from within Windows that damn near bricked the mainboard (Gigabyte P35 DS4 2.0). I was even considering buying a new mainboard (cheaper than buying W7 Ultimate). But then I did the smart thing, got award tool, built my own bios (using ISA instead of SSV3, not that I think it matters. And I read the instructions. Especially the part where it says "remove any softmods".
The thing is that pirated versions of Windows 7 always come with some sort of built-in activation through a softmod. It uses SLIC also in a manner of speaking but loads it into memory as the OS boots. Which is why it is so problematic with some mainboards (Gigabyte), because somehow this data gets shredded activating sleep (S3). I don’t know how it works, it just does. Anyway, as I came out of sleep using my new and properly hacked bios, I was frustrated to see that Windows 7 still lost validation. Everest showed the SLIC table, but SLIC had now automagically regressed to 2.0 (from 2.1 that is required). Thinking it was the softmod, I proceeded to find ways to get rid of it. Easier said than done of course when you haven’t installed it yourself.
My particular version of W7 was released by BIE. No word on the method used though. So I had a hunch. I remembered the Windows 7 Recovery Disc. I burnt and booted that, tried the automatic repair but it didn’t find any errors, opened the console, and ran bootrec /fixmbr and bootrec /fixboot. That seems to have done it! Though in retrospect, I might have been able to run the repair from my Windows installation.
Upon investigating the BIE hack further I found they had used the $OEM$ folder method to add a custom script. In this folder there was one bie7_inst.exe and one bie7_uninst.exe. Deleting this folder will obviously prevent the softmod from being installed (I just love having W7 on a USB stick). Running the uninstallation program would probably also have saved me a lot of work.
Also, a reminder when installing 7: Hack to Remove 100 MB System Reserved Partition When Installing Windows 7 (you might thank yourself later when you want Truecrypt or whatever).
