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The

"How I Flashed The BIOS Of A CIH-ed AP5T Mobo Without A Chip Programmer"

Home Page


What's New

May 8, 2000 - XOOM's server hosting my homepage has been down for at least 2 weeks now. Luckily I created a mirror site on GeoCities last month ..... or maybe it was because I created this mirror site! ;^)
Anyway, to I've re-routed the popular
http://surf.to/ga586hx address to point to this mirror site. Of course you can still use these URLs as well :-
http://go.to/hackedmobo
http://www.oocities.org/hackedmobo/index.html
April 19, 2000 - Over time, I've received a number of e-mails saying that my homepage could not be accessed. This has been due to XOOM's servers being down. To avoid these problems, I've set up a mirror site at Yahoo!'s Geocities. I don't know if Geocities will be any better than XOOM, but hopefully they won't be both down at the same time! ;^)
http://go.to/hackedmobo
http://www.oocities.org/hackedmobo/index.html
April 18, 2000 - E-mail address has been changed to hackedmobo@yahoo.com.
June 24, 1999 - Created The Hot-Swapped AP5T BIOS Home Page.

Contents


What is the CIH-ed AP5T?

The AP5T Rev 3.1 is a motherboard made by AOpen. It is a 430TX board that officially supports up to the AMD K6 233 or Cyrix MX-PR266. It has a switching voltage regulator that can provide both linear and dual voltages. It supports clock multiplier of 1.5x to 5.5x, and bus frequency of 60MHz, 66MHz, 75MHz, and 83MHz. Here's the User Manual ap5t-3man.zip (412KB). It's in PDF format, so you'll need the Adobe Acrobat Free Reader.


(Click to enlarge - 18.1KB)

The CIH or Chernobyl virus is a particularly nasty virus that infects Win32 executable files. It is also known as the Spacefiller virus because it occupies the blank or unused space inside a Win32 executable file. It does this to avoid changing the size of the file thereby reducing the chances of detection. Some variants of CIH activate on April 26, while others activate on the 26th of any month. It is nasty because it tries to corrupt the harddisk and BIOS of the PC. This means data is lost and/or the BIOS is trashed. More info at Network Associates AVERTLabs : W32.CIH.SPACEFILLER.

A friend of a friend had a bad encounter with this virus, and on April 26, 1999, his harddisk data and BIOS were gone. He decided to change to a FIC PA-2013 mobo and gave his dead AP5T to me.

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Why?

I've read a lot about BIOS flashing and recovery on the Net, in various Newsgroups and webboards, and in specialized websites like the well-known Wim's BIOS page.

A number of distinct techniques are available to revive a dead or CIH-ed BIOS :-

So when I received the AP5T, I took this opportunity to try these techniques out for myself.

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Contacts

Email address
hackedmobo@yahoo.com

Web address
http://surf.to/ga586hx
http://go.to/hackedmobo
http://www.oocities.org/hackedmobo/index.html

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Disclaimer

This webpage is meant to describe in some detail the work I did to flash the BIOS on my mobo. It is not meant be a user guide or a step-by-step how-to guide. Please use the information on this webpage at your own risk. I will not be held responsible in any way for any damages or costs resulting from its usage.

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Adrian
Last revised: October 29, 2000.
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