I want to write a BIOS for my laptop.

A little help? Could I reverse engineer the BIOS firmware on my Acer and modify it? Can someone point me to a place that can get me started?

 

Its easy, ill even help you

1) download a program called Phoenix BIOS editor 2.2.0.1 (assuming you have a phoenix BIOS)

2) Brick Notebook

Oh and make sure you research on the Crisis BIOS recovery before you decide to do this

what are you trying to achieve anyway?

 

Turn off my LEDs and boot faster.

 

Nice idea, but considering the hassle that professional BIOS writers have in making a few tweaks without adding new bugs, I suggest you first practice on a very old notebook with a simple BIOS.

Unless you can find documentation, you make have a challenge to figure out which part of the BIOS code does what.

John

 

I think the Power LED control is hard coded in the motherboard itself.

You could possibly disable the HDD LED by somehow tweaking the HDD stuff

Good luck on this anyway, just know the risks..

 

You could also remove all the LEDs altogether to minimize risk. I strongly recommend that you do not try to do what you're doing; or, if you insist, that you have a good recovery plan. If you break your BIOS, your laptop will be rendered useless.

 

Why don't you just unsolder the HDD LED. Less hassle IMO.

 

or just cover it with sticky tape lol

1 less LED wont save you 1 hour of battery life

 

^^ I think the brightness of the LEDs just bothers him.

 

Paint the LEDs with many layers of black paint.

 

lol. yea, just unsolder the LEDs. Think about it, if you brick your laptop, wouldn't you be thinking to youself: "wow....i just took out this x-hundred-dollar laptop to disable a couple of LEDs.....using a really bad method......"

Anyway, I think there's suppose to be some sort of a CRC checksum that motherboards perform on their BIOS and if it encounters and error...then....GG!!

 

What should I do if I bricked my laptop by trying to flash the OS? Can I restore it?

 

I'm pretty sure if you mess up your BIOS that's it, you have a new paper weight.

 

Can't I just flash it again with something hooked up to the USB? Maybe short circuit some jumper pins?

 

BIOS/firmware is whats used to startup the device. Corrupt that and your in big trouble

Theres something called Crisis recovery disc, it lets you recover bricked bios'es, i dont think its 100% full proof though

 

From what I've heard, no BIOS = no boot. Without being able to boot up, trying to reflash with your USB is the equivalent of sticking your USB into a computer that isn't turned on and hoping it will reflash. In other words, your computer won't know to look for anything because there's nothing on it. Again that's what I've been told.

 

It will still startup, but go no where, restart or maybe give you an error

someone in the hp section managed to unbrick his/her notebook using the crysis recovery. It scans for the disc at startup i believe

I know you can unbrick routers by slipstreaming it to the firmware cache

 

I've heard about the crisis recovery disc procedure, but I've also heard of far more cases where it didn't work than where it did.

Edited after reading flipfire's post.

 

hes not just after the lights, he wants to customise/control and tweak whatevers possible

 

The BIOS needs to be sufficiently OK to start, check out the hardware and then read the HDD / ODD etc. So if something to do with the hardware check is corrupted then you may never get to being able to read a file with a good BIOS.

Think of Windows when it has lost the driver to read to HDD. It starts to load and then you get BSOD. That's one problem that safe mode can't avoid.

John