White-listing a Mini-PCIe card to work on Lenovo

nIGHTmAYOR · 14 Nov 2018

So as you may know HP & Lenovo/IBM has an odd policy of white listing only few models of Wifi cards for a reason that they vaguely explain that they pay dear money to license each replacement card with FCC where i am not really sure why this trend only applies to just both of them but then i guess seeing that they sell their licensed cards at 150$ where intel marks them at 20~25$ tops might hint is all about corporate greed .

I came to all these information as i tried to upgrade to an affordable wireless ac card that was only about 21$ where i found that my only options were either to pay same amount to get a used licensed one that is 7 generations behind with basic features or the very same legacy licensed card only new from Lenovo costing 150$ where i doubt selling the laptop itself used would grant as much .

So basically i did my research and found that this had been on for a while and there are few options that surfaced , where either we dump our bios files and head to the deep web and ask a hacker to modify bios for us to remove white lists check , which while sounding pretty much disturbing is the favorite choice of all or trying to replace the new chip ids by older one's which would trick bios into believing its whitelisted and boot .

The only set back into such solution is that it all revolves around Linux and i cant really say i could follow any of these tutorials as they require good knowledge of Linux .

The trick is simple in nature , you run certain command that retrieves your current chip id then download and install another command that would allow editing chips ids then rather switch cards while laptop is booted as to bypass the whitelist check then do the replace ids .

Now my question , anybody know how this can be done in windows world ?

spunk · 16 Nov 2018

Or you could just buy the recommended hardware for the computer.

PolarNettles · 17 Nov 2018

Whether or not you can reprogram the HW ID will depend on the specific card you want to use. Then the driver would need to expose an interface to write to the EEPROM/NVM. Then you would need a tool to access the driver interface and write the whitelisted ID.

On Linux this is only possible with a few cards, and nothing recent from what I see.

It would probably be simpler to just get the modified BIOS.

nIGHTmAYOR · 17 Nov 2018

spunk said:

Or you could just buy the recommended hardware for the computer.

The recommendation doesnt revolve around security nor safety if you have read the post fully , as a matter of fact they risked the safety of all those who went down the deep web road and yet failed to answer them as to why they adopt such trend and had to flee mid way from all the valid arguments that were thrown at them in forums . The recommendation just revolves around 150$ legacy piece of hardware that can be replaced at a fraction of price .

PolarNettles said:

Whether or not you can reprogram the HW ID will depend on the specific card you want to use. Then the driver would need to expose an interface to write to the EEPROM/NVM. Then you would need a tool to access the driver interface and write the whitelisted ID.

On Linux this is only possible with a few cards, and nothing recent from what I see.

It would probably be simpler to just get the modified BIOS.

Well then so you recommend i hand the bios to the kind hearted hacker , ummm , there is no risk at that ? :)
Also where did you find a list of cards that are modable vs cards that are not , need to review it too see all my options .