www.LinuxHowtos.org

analyse BIOS

With the following command you are able to get some BIOS-versions or other interesting string from your bios.

 dd if=/dev/mem bs=1k skip=768 count=256 2>/dev/null | strings -n 8

This command reads the complete memory from X:0000 to F:FFFF.

This includes on most PCs the graphic card, mainboard and IDE/SCSI controller.

Only risk:
Some ISA cards which are in that memory region might react on the reading of the memory. But this happens only rarely.