Hacker News new | ask | show | jobs
by croes 737 days ago
A fallback BIOS should be standard by now

Didn't Gigabyte put that onto their mainboards
2 comments
rzzzt 737 days ago
Yes, around 2009: https://www.techpowerup.com/96967/dualbios-becomes-standard-...
link
jonathanlydall 737 days ago
Gigabyte has had dual bios motherboards since 1999, but made it standard for all their motherboards in 2009.

https://www.gigabyte.com/Press/News/795

As I recall, they initially introduced this feature due to a virus around the time which would intentionally corrupt BIOSes.

link
patrakov 737 days ago
The CIH virus? https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/CIH_(computer_virus)
link
sebazzz 737 days ago
And any server has them.

And for all the crap Lenovo laptops are these days; they also have backup BIOS.

Funnily enough, most BIOS updates end with a "self-healing backup progressing" screen nowadays - which makes me wonder: do they overwrite the backup and abuse that mechanism to update the primary bios?

link