question about motherboard BIOS viruses

[leeland]

just to cure my own curiousity and to settle a arguement between me and a friend

i don't have to much experience with this but if and you were to be unlucky enough to get one of these is it a recoverable deal

the friend of mine said that it is impossible to flash the BIOS after recieving a virus and that the board has to be sent back to the company to be repaired...i think that you should be able just run the flash program to update the bios and over write the virus


now please don't think i am nieve, but just wanted to hear what some people have had from experience or no how


thanks
leeland

 

[Iron Woode]

I think that a virus would setup a bios flash type program that would be launched on startup and would probably write junk to the bios chip. This would definitely screw up your pc.

Your best fix would be to order another bios chip from the manufacturer. Since most, if not all, boards use a socketed bios chip, it would be pretty simple to fix. The cost may be a pain, but it is the best way to get a system up and running.

 

[gaidin123]

If a virus hits your BIOS, your BIOS chip is generally fried and you need to get your motherboard manufacturer to send you a new one.

The Chernobyl virus was the last big BIOS virus that I recall getting a lot of publicity. It originally was set to "go off" on april 26th, the anniversary of the Chernobyl disaster...Cute.

Anyway check out http://www.cert.org/incident_notes/IN-99-03.html for more detailed information.

At the college where I worked as a student computer tech a couple years ago when this thing hit I was told that we got over a dozen calls to our help desk where peoples' computers mysteriously wouldn't boot at all (not even to the BIOS so you obviously couldn't flash the BIOS in that board) after a certain date...

Gaidin

 

[ARMac]

You can but not on all mobos,and if the not working bios is not phisicaly dammaged, and if mobos bios is socketed.

do this.
Change the bios with a new one or with one from another mobo. boot the system. While the system is working remove the bios chip and put the non working. Flash it. Restart and that's it . Ihave tryed this couple of times (i work as a computer service) and it worked , but on some boards it just won't cause of xxx reasons.

 

[leeland]

thanks guys for the info...so i was wrong as much as i hate to admit it, so just another reason to scan all the stuff being downloaded !!!

thanks again
leeland

 

[girish]

well, if the BIOS is socketed you can order a new one, or might reflash the BIOS by hotplugging into a known working identical board.

but as for virus trashing the BIOS, it cannot trash it compeletely. it has a protected bootblock of about 8k, which can be activated by starting the system with a certain key pressed or chaging a jumper on the board, when the Boot block code takes over and attempts to update the BIOS. for this you need to have a bootable floppy in the drive with the flasher and the BIOS binary image with a autoexec.bat file with the command to update the BIOS. as far as I know, this boot block does not support any PCI card, but you can get the display of the update progress if you have a ISA display card.

girish