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 -- LinuxBIOS mailing list LinuxBIOS@openbios.org http://www.openbios.org/mailman/listinfo/linuxbios
