Protecting BIOS

[Kulgan]

Does anyone know if there's a way to protect a Flash Bios chip, ie by covering one of the pins? I heard about this before... Thanks in advance. It's a Tyan 1854 via mobo

 

[vohwink1]

Protect it.. as in so you can't corrupt the ROM? Or protect it from damage when transporting it? A little unclear, but if you want to protect it from bad flashes and such, you could invest in a little thing called the BIOS Savior. It will hold two versions of your bios.. one as a backup. Then if you flash it, and its corrupt, you just flip a little switch and it will revert back to your backup BIOS. Pretty nice.. and for only 20 bucks. If you do a lot of flashing, or work with manually editing your bios, this is a nice tool.

http://direct.mwave.com/mwave/doc/A06950.html

for more detailed info.

 

[Kulgan]

Actually what I want to do is prevent from being flashed at all. My problem is some kiddies have been trying to reprogram the flash bioses in my school's computer lab. What I want to do essentially is to turn the flash roms to behaving like regular roms (which can't be erased.) What I'm thinking is there has to be a certain pin on the flash chip that I can cover with electrical tape that'll prevent the motherboard from being able to flash the chip.

 

[bacillus]

there may be an option in bios itself(my award bios has it) to enable or disable an update to bios. I believe that it's put there primarily to prevent a virus attack on the bios eeprom!

 

[vohwink1]

damn, these kids now days. I never did that sort of stuff when I was in school...

but hmm, yeah check the BIOS for a setting. But, if they are able to try and flash the bios, are they able to get INTO the bios? That could be bad.

 

[bacillus]

hmm, does your bios allow you to password protect it?
that would seem the best solution!