Bios bank check for suppport for hdd partition setup

[professor_jonny]

Would it be possible to warn a user if they install a bios in a flash bank with out support for the partition table installed in the currently formatted HDD.

[psyko_chewbacca NA]

Only way to do this would be by calculating some sort of checksum on the BIOS file. It's a bit unreliable.

[professor_jonny]

I believe most of the bioses are based of retail bios's and are just patches to retail code would it be possible to scan for this patch in the bios? I believe this is how xbpartitioner works as it does inform you of lba48 compatibility on load of the program.

A checksum would not work for example if you edit a bios with Xbtool it will fail the checksum.

A checksum could be tied in with a table for the bios bank auto naming but maybe just a simple window to tell the user to check their bios suitability after format from XBlast OS would be suitable added into the format warning screen or something.

[psyko_chewbacca NA]

Unpacking the BIOS image would require to integrate a cab unpacker library in XBlast OS. Even with this, the snippet of code that makes hacked BIOS support partition table might not be located at the same offset in every image. I suppose XBPartitionner ask for the partition table to the kernel. If the kernel doesn't reply with something valid, it assumes there is no partition table support. Here, there is no xbox kernel while XBlast OS is running, even in XBE mode as the XBE flushes the xbox kernel and replace it with its own (which is XBlast OS).

I'm not saying this is impossible but it might not be that easy to implement.