Award Bootblock BIOS
Today I tried reviving an old system for LinuxBIOS hacking: a Chaintech Apogee 7NJL1 board, which was never used, still in the original packaging.
After the first boot an unusual screen appeared which told me the following: ROM checksum failure. It was the Award Bootblock BIOS, a recovery system, which reads the AWDFLASH utility and a BIOS image from a floppy. It took a bit to find an appropriate bios image, as the manufacturer quit the motherboard business and no longer operates a support website. Shame.
So I had a floppy prepared (found an old 3com install disk and finally found a use for my USB floppy drive :) and the AWDFLASH ulility started up, until the next screen: The program file’s BIOS-Lock String does not match with your system!
Funny, the image in the flash is corrupt and the recovery utility stops because the mainboard identification string – which resides in the corrupted region – does not match.
My final fix was to hack the AWDFLASH utility and disable the check. In version 8.22A (file size is 39180 bytes, md5: 003f66c91f25744168a9814ddf04b22c) at byte offset 0×7dba change 0xf9 to 0xf8.
(Technically, 0xf9 is set carry flag, while 0xf8 is clear carry flag. This flag is used in the code later to determine error conditions. We report no error in any case, but the message itself will be displayed.)
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