A 512-byte boot sector that dumps your RAM to a USB stick
Freeze a laptop's memory chips to -60°C, reboot from a USB stick, and a 512-byte bootloader copies the RAM to disk before the bits fade. That is the cold-boot workflow BareMetal-RAM-Dumper is built to test.
BareMetal-RAM-Dumper boots without an OS from a 512-byte sector, flips the x86 CPU into unreal mode to reach memory above 1MB, then writes physical RAM to a USB drive in 32KB chunks. The pitch: cold-boot forensics and crypto-key recovery.
It runs only on legacy BIOS, and the thread pokes holes fast. One asks what was actually tested; another notes UEFI firmware would clobber the RAM before the dumper ever runs.
Freeze the chips, reboot, and grab the keys before they fade
BareMetal-RAM-Dumper, posted to GitHub by its author, is a pure-assembly x86 utility that dumps physical memory with no operating system in the way. Stage 1 is a 512-byte boot sector that loads Stage 2 via BIOS INT 0x13. Stage 2 switches the CPU into unreal mode to reach 32-bit physical addresses past the 1MB barrier, parses the memory map with INT 0x15 E820 to skip reserved regions, then copies RAM in 32KB chunks to a USB drive starting at LBA sector 64. A progress percentage ticks as it runs.
The use case is the cold boot attack: chill a laptop's DRAM to -60°C so the contents persist through a reboot, then boot this tool from USB and capture keys before the bits decay. It is AGPL-3.0, built with NASM, and it overwrites the target drive from sector 64, so the author warns to use a dedicated blank stick.
The thread wants proof, not a feature list
The Show HN read like AI-generated marketing, and a well-known researcher in the thread went straight at the testing claim.
"> successfully tested — Could you elaborate on this? What device did you test on, what was the test procedure, and what was the outcome?" — David Buchanan (Retr0id), security researcher
Then came the design objection that undercuts the whole approach on modern machines.
"Does it stop EFI from running first? I'd think that EFI would be clobbering a whole lot of RAM." — a reader on the tool's boot sequence
The post nearly drowned in flags for being AI-written, and a veteran stepped in to keep it alive.
"Haters, please stop flagging liffik's comments. I know you don't like AI but this thread was legitimately upvoted onto the front page" — Wes Felter, ex-IBM Research
Because the tool needs legacy BIOS/CSM, and UEFI firmware writes over low memory before any boot sector runs, the freeze-and-reboot trick barely applies to a current laptop. What survives is a clean lesson in real-mode x86, which is exactly the audience the author also lists.
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