Fixes and Update to AMI BIOS Reverse Engineering Article

I've made some fixes to the AMI BIOS Reverse Engineering article. The fixes mostly deal with the interpretation of the "headers" of the component in the decompressed AMI System BIOS module a.k.a AMI 1B module (near the end of section 4.4 until the end of the article). I have add some new information regarding the structure of AMI system BIOS as well. Anyway, I built 2 utilities to work with the AMI system BIOS module. The first one, to split the AMI system BIOS module into its components (or to "extract" one component from it) and the second one to insert a modified AMI system BIOS module's component into the AMI system BIOS module. You can download their source code here (both utilities source code are lumped together into one compressed file). The explanation about the utilities can be found here. I don't have enough time yet to make an article to explain them. Well, it should be clear from the source code even though they were quick hacks.

Award BIOS "support" for DLL Reversed

Just finished new article which reveal the inner working of DLL "support" in recent Award BIOS: Pinczakko's Guide to Reversing Award BIOS DLL "Support".

Using Modbin6 in Linux

You can use the wineconsole application to run a console BIOS utility such as modbin6 in Linux. Wineconsole is part of Wine. Now, let's see an example. Let say, I have installed Wine and I want to run modbin6 from my home directory (which should already contain the modbin6 executable), I would invoke it like this:

pinczakko@opusera:~/$ wineconsole MODBIN6.EXE

This is how the snapshot of the console which is spawned by the command above: Now, you can use the spawned console (which already runs modbin6) to navigate to the BIOS binary which you want to edit. Note that the path to the binary will default to "C:\" in wineconsole which would be in your wine "home directory". In my case the wine "home directory" is at ~/.wine and drive C in that directory is at ~/.wine/drive_c. Therefore, if you want to place the BIOS binary which you want to edit in drive C (C:\), you should copy the biary over to your drive_c directory, which is in my case at ~/.wine/drive_c. Below is the screen shot from a running Modbin6 in wineconsole. That's it. Now you should be able to work with modbin6 in linux.

BIOS Disassembly Ninjutsu 2nd Edition Progress

Hello all. I just want to inform about the latest status of the manuscript. It'll be considerably longer than the previous one and the chapter count will increase rather dramatically because I decided to divide the "monster" chapters in the previous edition into smaller chapters which hopefully easier to understand. I didn't realize about the really huge (read: hard to grasp) chapters prior to re-reading the copy that I have at hand. Some reorganization happens in it as well. Aside from those issues, I really want to dedicate a chapter to Coreboot this time around. Hopefully, I can make it in time. Cheers :-)

UPDATE:
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You can check the latest state of the book in this post: http://bioshacking.blogspot.com/2011/03/latest-state-of-bios-disassembly-book.html