Which utility can be used to read BIOS of PCI card?

[Zuni]

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Hello friends, I just wanted to ask that which utility can be used in order to read the BIOS of PCI controller for the hard drive. I am new to all these things and so want some suggestion from you people. If you people are having any idea about this the please post that over here. I am sure that this thread is going to be very useful for all the users like me who are searching for the same. Thank you so much in advance for reading and replying to this in advance. I hope that I will get some quick replies on this.

[Bageshri27]

I think that it will be better for you if you can make use of the flashrom. This is having support for many of the pci cards. But it must be noted that the pci hdd card must having the tool for updating this. This utility identifies Flash chips as those used by the BIOS of our PCs and laptops and can read information from them but what is more important, write, verify and erase to reprogram chips. With this utility you can "flash" images of the BIOS, EFI, coreboot and firmware of our devices.

As far as I know that the latest version for this is 0.9.1 which has at least 30 additional families Flash chips added since the last version. This tool avoids the use of traditional floppy disks or CD-ROMs to update the BIOS, and may be a much more comfortable to do this. One of the interesting aspects of this is the fact that besides being available for Linux (with binary packages for Debian, Ubuntu, Fedora, Gentoo, Mandriva and openSUSE) is also available for other platforms such as FreeBSD, DragonFly, Nexenta, Solaris and even Mac OS X. It seems that the solution is not recommended for laptops but it is perfectly usable on PCs, although the developer himself warns of the risks that always flash a ROM. I think that this is going to be the best for you. there might be some mgood alternative for this but I have used this on my computer so I am very confident with this.

[Zuni]

Originally Posted by Bageshri27

I think that it will be better for you if you can make use of the flashrom. This is having support for many of the pci cards. But it must be noted that the pci hdd card must having the tool for updating this. This utility identifies Flash chips as those used by the BIOS of our PCs and laptops and can read information from them but what is more important, write, verify and erase to reprogram chips. With this utility you can "flash" images of the BIOS, EFI, coreboot and firmware of our devices.

As far as I know that the latest version for this is 0.9.1 which has at least 30 additional families Flash chips added since the last version. This tool avoids the use of traditional floppy disks or CD-ROMs to update the BIOS, and may be a much more comfortable to do this. One of the interesting aspects of this is the fact that besides being available for Linux (with binary packages for Debian, Ubuntu, Fedora, Gentoo, Mandriva and openSUSE) is also available for other platforms such as FreeBSD, DragonFly, Nexenta, Solaris and even Mac OS X. It seems that the solution is not recommended for laptops but it is perfectly usable on PCs, although the developer himself warns of the risks that always flash a ROM. I think that this is going to be the best for you. there might be some mgood alternative for this but I have used this on my computer so I am very confident with this.

But this application is just supported for the Linux, if I am not wrong. I am searching for something that can work with the Windows platform. I have not tried with the flashrom but got this information from some of the other sites that this is just for the Linux plateform and so I just wanted to conform this.

[Dixie-R]

No, this is not just supported for the Linux. It will also work with the Windows as well. I have used the same and so I am very confident about this one. Just install this on your computer and then you will come to know that if this is working or not. There are many Rumor’s on the who spread such news which makes others to confuse. So just don’t believe on these things before you try that on your own. Flashrom is a universal flash programming utility for ROM / flash chips (eg in DIP or PLCC packaging). Also it has support for SPI chips. The tool can be overused to flash BIOS / firmware images. I don’t think that there is any good alternative for this utility that can replace this one.

[Dakshayani]

The flashrom is open source and free utility to detect, read, write, verify and erase flash chips. flashrom is often used in-system flash images of BIOS / EFI / coreboot / firmware using a supported mainboard, but also supports flash cards network cards (NIC), SATA controller, and other external device to program flash chips. The flashrom supports a wide range of chips DIP32, PLCC32, DIP8, SO8/SOIC8, TSOP32, TSOP40 and, using various protocols such as LPC, FWH, parallel flash, or SPI. Do not use the flashrom in laptops. The embedded controller (EC) found in many laptops interacts badly with any attempt to flash and can permanently brick your laptop.