pc bios read

Write the program that uses only int13h, place it into the boot sector, boot from the floppy. The program should read the BIOS and write it's contents to the floppy, block by block. You don't need more than 50 bytes of code to do this.

HTH, Vadim

With the same program offered by the vendor to reprogram it, usually. If your vendor's flash update utility doesn't support this, this may be reason to upgrade to a better vendor.

--
Hans-Bernhard Broeker (broeker@physik.rwth-aachen.de)
Even if all the snow were burnt, ashes would remain.

Won't work. PC BIOSes are usually compressed miniature filesystems. During boot, the BIOS is decompressed to shadow RAM and the physical flash chip is swapped out. Once the system has booted, you can only see the RAM copy, which is most definitely not a bootable copy of the original data.

Well, you are most likely right. The last time I've done something like this was before flash was used in PCs.

Vadim

The last time I *WANTED* to do this was when a PC BIOS consisted of 8K of code. As a fun project, I disassembled an XT-clone motherboard BIOS (one of those super-integrated "tiny turbo XT" boards barely big enough to hold five slots, with everything except the CPU in one

208-pin QFP). The aim was to get sourcecode that would build with TASM to a binary identical copy, and I didn't quite manage it because of issues with different ways of expressing the same instruction in the x86 opcode set.

Unfortunately, in more recent years I got dragged into needing to hack buggy Advantech BIOSes and in the process I learned more than I ever wanted to know about the anatomy of a modern BIOS.