Reversing Applications Running on DOS Extender

Some BIOS/Firmware-related utilities are running in DOS "extender" mode, i.e. 32-bit Flat Protected mode. Reversing this kind of executable is not quite as straight forward as other DOS programs. Some of them "bind" the DOS "extender" binary with the core application executable into one "integrated" executable. A further optimization that you might find is executable compression before "bind"ing the executable to the DOS "extender". How would you deal with this kind of binary? Well, to be honest. It's not quite easy, but I found these steps help:

1. Unbind the DOS "extender" from the "integrated" executable. For this, you can use the SUNSYS Bind Utility which is part of the DOS32A DOS extender. It's freely available at http://dos32a.narechk.net/index_en.html. Using the SUNSYS Bind utility, you can obtain the real executable. Usually in the form of LE executable. 
2. (This step is optional, depending on the condition of the "unbound" executable). If the LE executable is compressed with UPX, you can use the UPX utility to decompress the executable to obtain the real executable. The UPX utility supports decompressing executables packed with UPX, with the -d command.

After the step(s) above, everything is business as usual for the reversing ;-). This trick is probably handy in some situations. Anyway, if you need to boot to DOS to run DOS32A utility, you can use an empty flashdisk and boot to DOS (or Windows 98) from it. The HP USB Disk Storage Format Tool is handy on this situation.