The particulars of which bit stands for what can change from motherboard to motherboard, and even between bios revisions.
If you know two systems have the same bios revision, on the same motherboard, you can (in theory) copy one's bios settings to another by copying /dev/nvram to a file on the source machine, and copying it back to /dev/nvram on the destination. In practice, don't do that unless you're ok with the potability of bricking the destination system. /dev/nvram is a binary file representing the data in the cmos.
[bcrook@bcrook ~]$sudo od -c /dev/nvram 0000000 \0 \0 \0 354 \0 \0 \v 200 002 300 377 / / 247 254 222 0000020 \0 \0 \0 \0 \0 \0 \0 \0 \0 \0 020 \0 \0 325 J 377 0000040 \a 251 300 377 363 346 337 177 ~ 212 c 277 \a 037 321 0000060 341 023 217 P T } 030 f 021 001 377 035 235 l 256 353 0000100 { 276 210 244 ) 353 324 332 / 004 345 376 372 377 373 277 0000120 366 202 L Q 265 - 275 201 / \0 \0 \0 \0 \0 377 0000140 377 \0 / \0 \0 \0 \0 \0 \0 \0 \0 377 265 027 % \0 0000160 \0 0000162
As you can see, it is quite unintelligible. But you could 'save' your current working nvram today, and 'restore' it next week, after you bork some setting in the BIOS (assuming you can still boot).
On Mon, Mar 31, 2008 at 10:13 AM, Jonathan Hutchins [email protected] wrote:
On Mon, March 31, 2008 09:09, Leo Mauler wrote:
In Ye Olden Days of PC/MS/DRDOS, there were CMOS Setup Utilities which could be run from special boot disks. If such an application still exists, and works for modern CMOSes/BIOSes, I suspect that it is the only way I'm going to be able to change the system time on this computer, or more to the point tell the motherboard BIOS that the Legacy Keyboard option is disabled.
What there were were Motherboards who's CMOS lacked a built-in interface and required a regular disk-based program to change settings. Those programs are highly BIOS-specific and not at all general utilities.
Since Linux is able to read and write to the BIOS address range, sure, you can do it. The problem is knowing which portion of the address range means what - and without the interface program that lives in the BIOS, you're pretty much clueless about that.
The USB interface pre-dates USB "Human Interface Devices" (HID), which is why you'll see something like "support for legacy devices" in the BIOS config - which may or may not give you USB keyboard access to the BIOS.
Given that your motherboard is worth probably somewhere between $0 - $10, why not try to repair that PS/2 connector? Or just find a similar-spec board that will use your CPU and RAM.
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