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creating working PE file with BFD

peter matula xmatul01@stud.fit.vutbr.cz
Fri Jul 23 10:53:00 GMT 2010 
Hello, I have yet another PE related question.

I made program using BFD for transformation of ELF files to our internal 
binary format (working name - COFF because it is text representation of 
binary formats similar to COFF) and backwards. It works fine and 
executable file created by conversion ELF->COFF->ELF is all right.

Now I would like to transform other binary formats, starting PE. I was 
very pleased when I found pei-i386 in BFD target list. So I made little 
change in coff2elf module like this:
--- m_pBfd = bfd_openw(m_sElfOutputFile.c_str(), "elf32-i386");
+++ m_pBfd = bfd_openw(m_sElfOutputFile.c_str(), "pei-i386");
and left everything other untouched. I transformed PE->COFF->PE and try 
to run output file. It didn't work but at least it created PE file not 
so different from original. Analysis shows that biggest differences are 
in "NT additional fields" and output PE has problem to get to Import 
Table in .idata section (objdump -p hello.exe).

Here are outputs by AnywherePEViewer:
http://www.2shared.com/file/abisocMJ/pe_view.html

So my questions are:
Is BFD able to create valid PE file in general ?
Has someone experience doing something similar, any advices ?
What other changes are nessesary except changing target ? and how is 
creating PE by BFD different from creating ELF ?
Do you know about some materials that can help ?

I would be really glad if it would be possible to use already programmed 
elf2coff and coff2elf modules with some changes instead of programing 
separate programs using pelib or something else.

Peter Matula
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