On Sun, Apr 01, 2001 at 08:17:43PM +0100, David Stubbs wrote:
> Hi,
>
> Are you the same person who was asking this on IRC in #PIC the other night?
> I don't know much about writing to BIOS except that it is extremely
> dangerous. I don't quite get why you would like to take such a risk just out
> of curiosity. Besides, motherboard manufacturers give away perfectly good
> BIOS flashing tools. The only people I could imagine having an interest in
> this are people writing harmful virus's.
>
> I'm sure you are not trying to do this for illegitimate purposes but I'm
> sure you can see how I could come to this opinion.
>
  I'm sorry, but I can't agree with your opinion. I had to build a modular
controller system using many diskless PC boards - CPC2245 produced by
Advantech. To lower the end price of the solution and to make the management
of the whole system easier, I had to make them net-bootable (the boards AKA
"biscuit PC's" are equipped with NIC, but there is no place net bootrom).
 Unfortunately, Advantech didn't provide such functionality in their
standard BIOS. Even worse - the only net-bootable BIOS provided by the
Advantech (which anyway required the BIOS reprogramming) used only the
very old RPL protocol, which was not compatible with Linux DHCP server used
for management of the whole system.
  So the only way to do my job was to prepare the customized BIOS adding muy
own module emulating the additional ISA or PCI BIOS, and reprogramm the
flash.
  So there are really some situations when someone has to reprogram the
flash with BIOS...

  BTW AFAIR the original poster didn't ask how to erase/reprogram the BIOS
in the motherboard (kind of knowledge really "useful" for virus writers),
but how to build the flash programmer...
  BTW 2. It is really easy to fail when upgrading BIOS. Just imagine the
power supply failure in the middle of the process...
--
                                Regards,
                                Wojciech Zabolotny
                                wzab@ise.pw.edu.pl

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