On Sun, 2005-12-04 at 00:45 -0600, Richard Smith wrote:
Well, it would be kind of nice to not have to fork out money on a programmer if I can do it from the host system, though. Maybe I can use MSI's firmware programmer with a LinuxBIOS image?
Unless it does some sort of checksum deal that should be possible but you are going to have to do the hotswap trick. Otherwise after the first flash you won't be able to go back since you have to have a working BIOS to floppy (or CDROM) boot.
I've heard that quite a few newer MBs (and I think mine is included) is supposed to have some kind of keystroke that one can depress while booting, and it will attempt to load a BIOS image from floppy regardlessly of the contents of the BIOS flash chip. Would you know anything about if that's mere rumor or if it's true?
Get a spare chip, hot swap it and program in a 2nd copy of the factory bios so you can rollback
I may well be wrong about this, but aren't the BIOS flash chips hardwired to the MB these days?
Are you sure? I can't remember signing a license for the BIOS code, in which case I should be allowed to read and study it.
Reading and studying is onething. Public distribution of what you find is another.
The DMCA is evil. None of us are lawyers so the only way to _insure_ we don't get into trouble is to clean room it which means no dissassembly. (Without permission)
Fortunately, I don't live in the U.S., and as such am not affected by the DMCA. Less fortunately, I'm not a lawyer either, though, so I have no idea if you'd be able to use anything that I would disassemble.
Fredrik Tolf