problem obtaining the bios serial id from an Award BIOS

belingueres

Hi,

I'm having trouble getting the serial id of the BIOS on my machine (it has an Award BIOS, and it is relatively new a Pentium III with a Soyo motherboard).

Anyway.

I'm programming in C++, and I guess I'm correctly traversing the SMBIOS table structures (since some utility I downloaded shows me the same information I'm obtaining).

More specifically, what I can't obtain is the last part of the BIOS id string, which ends like something like this:

2A5LEF09C-00

Is this information accesible differently than using the BIOS table structures?
Is it in a fixed 32 bit address?
Is this problem present on other BIOS manufacturers too?

Any clue will be valuable.

TIA,
Gabriel

ruelnov · Posted: Tue Jul 13, 2004 4:44 am Post subject:

If you can still boot from this board, press PAUSE (or CTRL+BREAK) while it's booting up and you should see the complete BIOS ID string at the bottom of your screen.

If not, open the bios binary in Modbin and it's listed under BIOS Message.

belingueres · Posted: Tue Jul 13, 2004 1:21 pm Post subject:

I can perfectly boot from this machine.
I'm not having hardware problems, but what I want to do is a program that obtain the complete BIOS id string.

Right now, I'm doing it in C++ with relative success:

I can traverse the SMBIOS table structures one by one without problem, but I can't assemble the complete id string that appears at the bottom of the screen on boot time since I can not find one of the serial id's that appears there, by means of traversing the BIOS table structures.

That's why I suspect I'm missing something or that serial id is in some fixed 32 bit address, or else there must be some standard way of retrieving it, but I don't now it yet.

TIA

ruelnov · Posted: Tue Jul 13, 2004 3:07 pm Post subject:

I can locate my complete BIOS ID String from offset EC71h to offset EC8Fh of the BIOS Dump from memory.

belingueres · Posted: Tue Jul 13, 2004 7:08 pm Post subject:

Yeah, I can locate it too in the 32-bit memory adresess ranging from 0xf0000 to 0xfffff.

However, the question is: Is it portable across all Award BIOS to get it at that fixed position? or is it some method to go get it (for example, from some pointer in other fixed memory address)?

Gabriel

ruelnov · Posted: Wed Jul 14, 2004 1:21 am Post subject:

It's mapped in that area of memory for Award bioses, as far as I know.