Arduino Uno BIOS flasher

We’ve seen the Arduino used to flash BIOS chips several times now. But these hacks are almost always the result of a bad flash. This time around [GNUtoo] is interested in putting a tool in your hands which can be used to flash Coreboot to your motherboard. His offering uses the Arduino Uno, but there are several other hardware … Read the rest

Brute Force BIOS Hacking Using the Arduino

This clever hack uses an Arduino to do a brute force attack on a computer’s BIOS. In theory, this technique could be used for other programs, but it’s use would be limited since there’s no way to account for too many wrong passwords.

The Arduino generates and outputs the possible password emulating a USB keyboard. When this is done, the … Read the rest

Recovering a corrupted EEE PC BIOS

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[Jeremy] had an ASUS EEE PC 1000HE netbook on his hands which had succumbed to a corrupted BIOS. In most situations, people replace a motherboard when the BIOS is damaged beyond repair, but considering the price of motherboards, especially those built for portable devices, he simply refused to go that route.

Instead, he took it apart and did a little … Read the rest

Laptop BIOS password recovery using a simple dongle

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In his line of work, Instructables user [Harrymatic] sees a lot of Toshiba laptops come across his desk, some of which are protected with a BIOS password. Typically, in order to make it past the BIOS lockout and get access to the computer,  he would have to open the laptop case and short the CMOS reset pins or pull the … Read the rest

Grinding down your computer to just 8.5 watts

What can you do to make sure your system is running as efficiently as possible? Take a page out of [Mux's] book, who went to great lengths to measure and adjust his system for ultimate efficiency (translated). What he ended up with is 8.5 Watts of consumption at idle and about 50 Watts under load. Luckily he posted … Read the rest

BIOS password cracking

[Dogbert] took a look at the security that goes into BIOS passwords on many laptops. He starts off with a little background about how the systems work. People are bound to forget their passwords, so when you enter a wrong one three times in a row you get a message similar to the one above that locks you out until … Read the rest

Unbricking with the help of Arduino

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This bricked Eee PC came to [Janzo] for about $50. Everything was fine with it, except for the failed bios update that rendered it useless to the last owner. [Janzo] set to work with an Arduino on a quest to repair the bios. He looked up the datasheet for the EEPROM that stores the bios and did some … Read the rest