Bios on Anything About IT

What happens before the OS loads

Tue, 21 Oct 2008 19:12:02 +0000

Ever wondered what actually happens when you turn on your PC before it loads the operating system ? Watch this video with Jamie Schwartz, Development Lead, Windows Kernel Dev team, and Andrew Ritz, Development Manager, Windows Kernel Dev team.

Windows Vista PreOS Environment: What happens before the OS loads

vPro colors in BIOS

Fri, 26 Sep 2008 19:48:16 +0000

When remotely accessing the system BIOS of a HP Compaq dc7800 desktop machine using vPro, the BIOS appears in black and white as shown in the picture below:

to get the native BIOS colors you must configure the terminal emulator mode to ANSI

then, the BIOS will appear with colors as if you were sitting in front of the physical machine.

Thanks to Claude Henchoz for the hint.

BIOS Boot delay on VMWARE

Tue, 03 Jun 2008 09:56:00 +0000

Ever had that issue that you wanted to enter the VMWARE BIOS, but you simply don’t made it because the VMWARE session boots too fast ?

Add the following line to your *.vmx file.

bios.bootDelay = "3000"

http://communities.vmware.com/docs/DOC-1201¨

Automate BIOS configuration for HP clients

Fri, 30 May 2008 13:22:00 +0000

Today the following options exist to automate BIOS configuration for HP clients:The Client Management Interface allows you to use WSH to retrieve and set BIOS settings like in the example below which changes the Ownership Tag.

Const wbemFlagReturnImmediately = 16
Const wbemFlagForwardOnly = 32
lFlags = wbemFlagReturnImmediately + wbemFlagForwardOnly
strService = "winmgmts:{impersonationlevel=impersonate}//"
strComputer = "."
strNamespace = "/root/HP/InstrumentedBIOS"
strQuery = "select * from HP_BIOSSettingInterface"
Set objWMIService = GetObject(strService & _
strComputer & strNamespace)
Set colItems = objWMIService.ExecQuery(strQuery,,lFlags)
‘ "Enter Ownership Tag" is the name of the BIOS setting
‘ instance object that we want to update. The correct
‘ names of available settings are found by enumerating
‘ all instances of HP_BIOSSetting.
For each objItem in colItems
objItem.SetBiosSetting oReturn, _
"Enter Ownership Tag", _
"Some environment-specific inventory code", _
"1E302E020304"
Next
Dim strReturn
Select Case oReturn
Case 0 strReturn = "Success"
Case 1 strReturn = "Not Supported"
Case 2 strReturn = "Unspecified Error"
Case 3 strReturn = "Timeout"
Case 4 strReturn = "Failed"
18
Case 5 strReturn = "Invalid Parameter"
Case 6 strReturn = "Access Denied"
Case Else strReturn = "..."
End Select
WScript.Echo "SetBiosSetting()

More information about HP CMI can be found here: http://h20331.www2.hp.com/Hpsub/cache/284014-0-0-225-121.html?jumpid=reg_R1002_USEN