"Do you know of any way to PREVENT the BIOS from being "Flashed" in the
first place?"

Older systems, from before the implementation of the handy flash
BIOS upgrade, will not lose the BIOS - although they can still lose all
the data on the hard drive if any virus gets past your antivirus precautions.
Do you scan all floppies or files from "strange" systems?  Even the ones
the kids swapped at school?  BACKUP frequently.

If even the emergency boot block has been overwritten, then you have to
choose between "hot swapping" the BIOS or replacing the chip.
May I suggest that those who are (justifiably) reluctant to hot swap their
BIOS chips try calling their local repair shops to see if they have a device
programmer (PROM burner).  If you can download the BIOS code, they should
be able to program your old BIOS chip (or replace it if it was physically
damaged).

It seems to me that you could copy the code on a good (flashable) BIOS chip
onto an appropriate one-time-programmable PROM chip.  As long as you don't
try to resell the original BIOS chip, and keep it as a backup for its
original system, I don't think this would violate the spirit of copyright.
This would, of course remove the flash upgrade feature (until you put
back the original).  Unless this system was a high-security server (for
a bank, etc.), I think that the usual antivirus measures should be
sufficient.

Boyd Ramsay

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