I encountered a similar situation with an iDRAC in an R720. Ultimately, I had to do the full iDRAC reset to factory procedure. It was a hassle, but it worked. I'm guessing that some things are only probed on first boot rather than every boot. The iDRAC signaling/communication with PERCs has always felt very... clunky and cumbersome.

Well that's obvious. We stay down there for the organic, all-natural artisinal radon gas, of course.

You bet your boots I'd put my brain in a cyborg body! Even if they are only 5 feet tall!

While likely related, Martin Burnicki posted a more detailed explanation of the actual event to the time-nuts mailing list:

https://ancillary-proxy.atarimworker.io?url=https%3A%2F%2Fwww.febo.com%2Fpipermail...

While your scenario is entirely plausible; why would anyone spend money to 'hack' a rental car? They wouldn't be able to predict who will drive it next or even when. I mean, sure, teenagers will shoplift spraypaint to tag up the local underpass; but with regards to this, the talented have better things to do and sophomoric aren't renting cars.

Personally, I'd worry about this less than I worry about skin cancer.

P.S. That being said, I will admit I bought a more expensive bluetooth OBD-II adapter to use in my explorer that requires a physical button press to pair. Cheaper adapters are generally discoverable when not connected to a host and used a generic 0000 or 1234 pin. I leave the adapter plugged in all the time because there's an old android tablet between the seats that logs OBD-II PIDs while I'm driving and auto-uploads them when I'm in my driveway.

Running out of conventional memory? Yeah, I know your pain. Well, I'll tell you a secret. There's this fancy thing called EMM386.. just add it to your CONFIG.SYS after the LOAD=HIMEM.SYS and don't forget to specify DOS=HIGH. It's really that easy and it should get you an easy extra 30 maybe even 45 kB more free RAM.

Cheers.

P.S. MSCDEX is for wimps.

I agree. I call bullshit.

What he describes is plausible, especially if the flash is socketed. But, not bloody likely. Considering that this malware would have to add itself to the existing flash image as an option rom or by infecting and rewriting part of the bios code and then writing that back to the rom.. Unless this was a targeted attack, the malware author would have to work out logic for each one of the major base BIOSes in use - phoenix, award, dell, lenovo, etc to be able to infect them. This is ignoring lots of machines which prevent either prevent rewriting the flash without physical access or require the new system image to be signed. Also, keep in mind that testing this ahead of time is rather difficult given the wide range of different BIOSes on different motherboards, etc. any unexpected bug could render an infected machine unbootable. So, hell of a lot of work for the malware/virus author with quite a lot of risk for failure.. especially when there's a lot of lower hanging fruit.

I don't doubt that it's happened to someone out there.

Also, I do believe this is one of the scenarios Intel TXT is for.

I grok what you're suggesting.

What about the Sony SVO-5800? It would appear to be a "broadcast quality" sony s-vhs deck and would appear to be able to read and write regular VHS tapes. Am I missing something or is this a rare exception to your stated rule?

It appears I set it as a preference once. I hadn't bothered to change it. This better? Sorry for the horrification.