Hacking Starforce 3 with BIOS

[Joe Forster/STA]

If I understand it correctly, this doesn't change the BIOS (software), "only" the current computer configuration.

In that case, if I'm not mistaken, you can recover your PC, if you manage to mess up something, by switching it off, enabling the "clear CMOS" jumper on the motherboard (see the manual), switching the PC on for a few seconds/minutes, switching it off, and disabling the jumper. Please, confirm.

However, I don't quite understand what the BIOS has to do with all this. I thought that - along with HAL.DLL etc. - Windows loads in its native IDE driver and doesn't use the BIOS for IDE access anymore. This is kind of proven by the fact that disabling the IDE controller in the BIOS does not fool (newer versions of) Starforce. Also, another fact that Starforce cannot re-activate disabled IDE devices on nForce chipset proves that - at some point(s) - Starforce actually accesses IDE devices directly via the IDE controller.

I also don't understand what all those instances of 0x0571 are (there are four of them on the picture!). I would've assumed that only one of them is the device identifier and the others are backups/mirrors/placeholders/whatever.

No, I don't have a VIA-chipset motherboard but, if I had one, I would first want to understand what this is all about before actually trying it...!