Sorry for waking up an old thread, but I had the same problem as you on my acer aspire 5684WLMi, that Intel VT was disabled in bios and was not possible to enable. It appears that Intel VT should be easily configurable from the bios, but acer have removed this setting from bios and disabled it. However, by searching on the web I found a
forum thread regarding this issue. This thread was for bios hackers sharing knowledge of trying to enable Intel VT on different bios'es. In short, they reverse-engineered the bios image to find information regarding Intel VT. While I was looking I came across
this post where a guy had reverse engineered his aspire 5684 bios. I followed the general instructions and used the info on his post to enable Intel VT on my computer, and it worked!
Note: The information provided here is provided "as is" for informational purposes only. It worked for me, but don't blame me if this will screw your computer.... I also assume that you (not only the topic starter, but other readers too) actually have an Intel VT processor, and an acer laptop (preferably an 5680 series) and, of course, no visible bios option for enabling Intel VT.
First, go to the
acer download page for the
5680 series, download the latest bios
(3.60 at the moment) and flash it. I have disassembled it myself and confirmed that the info on
this post applies to the 3.60 version of bios for acer 5680 series, although he used 3.50 bios, so it shouldn't be necessary for you to disassemble and check yourself. However; if you want to, or if someone else with another bios version and/or another acer series, I reccomend you to disassemble.
To disassemble a phoenix bios image you first need to extract it. The image is located in the 3.60 bios package in Winflash_360/BL50360A.WPH (or something equal with another bios version). Install phnxdeco [apt-get install phnxdeco]. View the content with [phnxdeco BL50360A.WPH -ls] and extract it with [phnxdeco BL50360A.WPH -xs]. In my bios version, the Intel VT part is located in the file BIOSCOD6.ROM. Disassemble it with your favorite disassembler, I used ndisasm in the ndasm package. I ran [ndisasm BIOSCOD6.rom > BIOSCOD6.asm] to save the output to BIOSCOD6.asm. I am no bios hacker, so I can only help you check that the Intel VT part of your bios is equal to mine. Search for [mov ax,0x30f] in the BIOSCOD6.asm file. If you find it, compare that part of your bios with the disassembled part of the bios on
this post. If it looks the same (check that [mov ax,0x30f], [mov ax,0x312] and [mov ax,0x330] is present), it is probably safe to do the following hack. I repeat myself; YOU DO THIS ON YOUR OWN RISK.
You will have to use
symcmos, a dos utily to make changes to bios. You will also need a working DOS environment. If your computer have a floppy drive, make a system floppy disk from windows, or do as me, use a
boot cd (I didn't have a floppy drive...). Make sure you copy both symcmos and a dos editor (I used Dos Edit, in the system32 folder in windows xp, you only need the file edit.com). Fire up the boot cd, and make sure that you have free space (I had to use a temporarily folder on my fat32 partition). Run [SYMCMOS -v2 -lNVRAM0.TXT] (small L). This will extract the part of the bios that can enable Intel VT. Open NVRAM0.TXT with an editor. If you use bios 3.50 or 3.60 you should find <(0312) [0000]>. Edit the file so that 030F, 0312 and 0330 all have the value 0001 (you may have to add 030F and 0330 to the list; I had to). Save the file as TRY01.TXT. Apply it with [SYMCMOS -v2 -uTRY01.TXT]. If you did this correctly, you will now have Intel VT enabled by bios!
Credits to the guy posting
this post; I am just rewriting the same information so it is a little easier to understand.