Re: intelligent disassembly

Terence <tbwright@xxxxxxxxx> writes:

Debug is fine for DOS boot sectors.

Thanks, that's very good to know. The boot sector I want to look at
is actually one produced by Lilo, produced on a RH Linux system and
apparently produced using as86 and ld86. Linux doesn't seem to have
any tools for disassembly of the 8086 binary files that are produced,
but I have FREEDOS installed on another partition on the same machine,
so I figured I'd try to use something from that platform. Is there a
way to save a transcript of the DEBUG session?

I'm aware of dosemu under Linux but it doesn't work very well on my
system.

I've even worked out how some very nasty viruses worked (back when we
competed to report them and identify critical parts), with DEBUG.
However, Bubble, Dasm, Dis86, IDA, and Sicetool are usable programs
all available - try via Google to find these as freeware or shareware
(and I have Sourcerer on a CD somewhere I can't lay my hands on now..)

I did a Google search of the disassemblers you mentioned and was led
to a Wikipedia page that also mentions Norman Ramsay's New Jersey Toolkit,
which he uses to construct disassemblers for various machines. The source
code comes in the form of a literate program and I'm a big fan of literate
programming. So, I've downloaded that and will try to make sense of it.
That might let me stay in Linux and do this.

Of course, the boot sector that is produced by Lilo derives from source code
that is freely available and which I have a copy of. But I'd like to compare
the final product with the sources, hence the need to look at the boot sector.
--
Ignorantly,
Allan Adler <ara@xxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxx>
* Disclaimer: I am a guest and *not* a member of the MIT CSAIL. My actions and
* comments do not reflect in any way on MIT. Also, I am nowhere near Boston.
.

Relevant Pages

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