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| Thread ID: 36088 | 2003-07-30 12:36:00 | Take a "snapshot" of the BIOS ? | PoWa (203) | Press F1 |
| Post ID | Timestamp | Content | User | ||
| 164019 | 2003-07-30 12:36:00 | I was wondering if you can like make a full copy of the information stored inside the BIOS, and say store it as a file on my hard drive? Then say I change a few settings in the bios, what can I use to compare the two BIOS's to see what has been changed? |
PoWa (203) | ||
| 164020 | 2003-07-30 23:50:00 | If you have a printer that connects to the parallel port of your PC then you can print off screenshots. The parallel port is active when you are in the BIOS screens. All you should need to do is ensure the printer is turned on and then hit the Print Screen key on your keyboard. I find this a handy way to record BIOS settings before changing & tweaking them. Saves a hell of a lot of writing :) |
southern_jas (4017) | ||
| 164021 | 2003-07-31 04:30:00 | There are programmes around (and are easy to write) which extract the 64 bytes of CMOS memory of the traditional AT BIOS. I have meant to explore the modern ones to see if this is resonable to do. I suspect there are more than 64 bytes now ...The beuaty of this method is thatyou could restore the CMOS contents with another simple programme. These were essential tools when playing around with assembly language programmes which could do lots of damage. :_| | Graham L (2) | ||
| 164022 | 2003-07-31 05:07:00 | A program like WCPREdit (hp.vector.co.jp) may do what you're after. However the saved configuration is unlikely to be very friendly to read. A PCR file for your chipset should be easily obtained which will explain what the registers you are changing do however. | BIFF (1) | ||
| 164023 | 2003-07-31 06:28:00 | "User friendly" ? User Hostile, is more like it. It's just the bytes. Binary information. The AT (traditional) part is documented, so it's easy to decode. The individual manufacturers' extensions woudl be interesting to find. | Graham L (2) | ||
| 164024 | 2003-07-31 14:54:00 | Lets just say someone will be helping me and putting some code into my bios that will fix it, and I'm not supposed to know what this code is. I want to see what the person has changed, so I can use the fix again in future. Strange situation, but I can't elaborate more. :) The send to printer idea is quite good, but does it print absolutely everything in the BIOS? I kinda want every byte in there, and then compare what has been changed. Ok I've had a look at WPCRedit and it created some PCR files on my computer. They seem readable in notepad. I'm guessing that is a copy of all the info in the BIOS??? Lets say I change one or two settings, and then I make some new PCR files, how can I compare them, to see which ones have been changed? Graham, you talk about these programs that extract the info out of the CMOS, sowhere can I find these programs ;) I guess a name or something and I can google it haha. Thanks people, and keep the ideas coming. |
PoWa (203) | ||
| 164025 | 2003-08-01 01:24:00 | to get a "snapshot" of the current bios, you will need to go through the normal proceedure of flashing from floppy disk, and make sure you have plenty of space on your floppy disc (use a drdos bootdisk instead of an msdos one - bootdisk.com is your friend in this case) the flashing program will ask you if you want to make a backup of your current bios, say yes and give it a name such as oldbios.bin (or whatever extension is used by your mobo manufacturer), the flashing program will save a copy of your current bios to floppy and then it will ask you if you want to continue flashing. If you want to, say yes, if not, say no. Restart into windows and voila... one "snapshot" of your bios now resides on that floppy disk... Now it's up to you and google to figure out how to get into that bios, analyse and change it |
whetu (237) | ||
| 164026 | 2003-08-01 02:04:00 | I may take an image of my bios and see if I can make sense from it. Been a while since I had to 'hack my bios' and this was just adding my own picture to it and having my name appear. What I would do is get the flashing utility for your BIOS, take the image of it restart and alter the bios again and take another image, disassemble it both of them with a disassembler and learn from there, another option would be open them both up with a hexeditor but this may not make much sence seeing hex but you could compare the byte changes. When attempting to 'hack your bios' always make a backup and don't change too many things at once, always keep checking that you can still boot into DOS or else you can end up with one dead CMOS and I don't think it's the one you can recover from by discharging it either. |
Kame (312) | ||
| 164027 | 2003-08-01 02:36:00 | Modbin.exe and various versions of Cbrom.exe are tools I use for customising the BIOS chip. | Terry Porritt (14) | ||
| 164028 | 2003-08-01 03:07:00 | The less ambitous things I had in mind (just the CMOS settings, rather than BIOS code) can be done with some from the /msdos/sysutl/ directory in the Simtel archive. cmos14.zip has a text file which gives the format of the CMOS data. cmos933cd.zip, cmosram.zip , and cmostool.zip also look interesting. Getting the settings can be done with this Tutrbo Pascal fragment: { with a "uses dos, crt;" somewhere } for ii := 0 to 63 do begin Port[$70] := ii; cmostable[ii] := Port[$71]; end; ... where cmostable is an array of bytes and Port is the predefined IO "ports array" in TP. The text file with cmos14 suggests using 128 bytes rather than 64... with $40-$79 reserved for manufacturers extras over and above the AT standard. You can even do it in DEBUG. :D I had to set the harddisk byte to $03 to be able to acess the hard disk of an early Compaq I had which didn't have setup code in the bios. The first two save and put routines were tiny .COM files a few bytes long came from the US magazine PC World. Good luck. |
Graham L (2) | ||
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