20 Mar
1999
20 Mar
'99
12:59 a.m.
At 06:25 AM 3/20/99 +0000, Eric wrote:
In a flash BIOS, maybe, although that would be tend to
be specific to a
certain motherboard. There's no general way to write a virus that can trash
the BIOS on any arbitrary motherboard, because unlike much of the
"PC standard", there is not a stanard for how the flash BIOS programming
works. Different motherboards use different types of flash chips that
have different programming requirements.
*Note* This is hearsay as I didn't go with the AWARD BIOS for our system at
FreeGate, we used the AMI BIOS instead, however the hack does exist which
lends at least some credibility to the message.
I was told, by a person normally familiar with such things, that in an
effort to be "helpful" AWARD added some "internal use only" calls to
their
BIOS that, when called, enable the FLASH for writing and can write to it.
Allegedly it is pretty clearly documented in the OEM kit. This saves on
manufacturers having to write their own BIOS update program since they can
use the "standard" one supplied by AWARD.
--Chuck