Hi,
At work we have a cad-cam device running off of an MSI X99a Raider motherboard. The bios is a custom job made by MSI or modified specifically by manufacturer. This is evident as the company name and logo appears in the setup menu of the bios. I also suspect that the manufacturer has left keys embedded in the bios that would prevent the CAD-CAM device from operating if you were to upgrade the bios which I can not say for sure as there has been reports that people who have upgraded the motherboard have had issues getting it to work but I can’t say for sure as its all anecdotal. All I want to do is upgrade the bios to a newer version and then later perhaps upgrade the motherboard. If only the manufacturer would release a new rom or even acknowledge weather its safe to upgrade to latest version.
So steps I have taken so far was to unpack the roms using UEFIExtract and analyze the version info in AMIBCD. The only difference I have found was with the NvVar files and a few pad files. Not sure if it was because its a dump and all the NvVar variables in the rom got copied that don’t exist in a standard bios file. The dump bios version according to AmiBcd is 2525 with major version 25 and minor 14 with a P4 version designation where as the stock bios has a versioning scheme going from P10 to P70 and major version 25 with minor version 10 to 70.
Anyhow if there are any security keys embedded in the bios I have not been able to find them. Have included my bios dump for analysis if anyone would like to take a look.
Thank you.
x99dump.zip (5.3 MB)