[LinuxBIOS] Getting Friendly with Flashrom

joe at smittys.pointclark.net joe at smittys.pointclark.net
Thu Mar 22 05:53:30 CET 2007


Quoting Corey Osgood <corey_osgood at verizon.net>:

> David H. Barr wrote:
>> On 3/21/07, Carl-Daniel Hailfinger   
>> <c-d.hailfinger.devel.2006 at gmx.net> wrote:
>>> On 21.03.2007 01:53, David H. Barr wrote:
>>>> On 3/20/07, David H. Barr <dhbarr at gozelle.com> wrote:
>>>>> I have not yet issued a write in the ORG position, only read and  
>>>>>  verify.  I
>>>>> erased the Pm49FL004 flash part present in the BIOS Savior, not   
>>>>> the onboard
>>>>> W39V040B.
>>>> Long story short, flashrom -w is a no-go for this board (MSI K9N Neo f
>>>> / ms7260).
>>>>
>>>> Anyhoo, chalk another board on the "needs vendor mojo to enable   
>>>> writes" list.
>>>> For the record, the vendor-supplied utility is "AMIFlh.exe" from AMIBIOS.
>>> Does AMIFLH.exe work in dosemu or some other environment where it can be
>>> aborted while flashing so we can find out if an aborted AMIFLH is enough
>>> for flashrom -w to work?
>>
>> A few unsorted thoughts:
>>
>>   - the correct name of this tool is AFUDOS; AMIFLH is a vendor re-badge
>>   - the same type of utility from Award / Phoenix is AWDFLASH
>>   - MSI uses both AWD and AMI BIOS images, so the "mojo" may be present
>>     in both utilities (a generic enable sequence?  a list of enable  
>>  sequences?)
>>   - as you mention, what about aborts / interrupts
>>   - what about a binary patch against one of these tools to "force" a write
>>   - along that same line, what about disabling one or more section of these
>>     tools to end up with a simple "enabler", or a brute force writer, or ???
>>   - my hunch tells me the AWDFLASH util is more logical, and therefore
>>     easier to toy with;  AFUDOS appears to be built on top of another tool
>>
>> I'll try some follow-up with various dos-type environments to see if
>> that particular avenue of investigation takes me anywhere.  I'd be
>> happy with any clearly legal solution that can be a) reliably
>> reproduced, b) documented, and c) automated.
>>
>> -dhb.
>>
>
> Probably a stupid question, but why don't we just ask the uniflash
> developer how he figured it out? He's got support for several different
> boards with special locking mechanisms.
>
> -Corey
>
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>
I ack that Corey, I think uniflash is much more powerful than any of  
the vender provided dos flashing tools available!

Thanks  - Joe





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