82801ER, bios flash possible?

  • Thread starter Thread starter BobMarley
  • Start date Start date
BobMarley said:
is it possible to upgrade firmware on the 82801ER SATA raid
controller?
Click to expand...

When a motherboard has RAID controllers on it, a RAID BIOS
module is included inside the BIOS flash image. Asus does not
generally keep track of the module revision number, in each
release of firmware, so it is up to volunteers who tear BIOS
apart, to figure out what revision is in there.

Using release 1018 for your board, and using amibcp75.exe, the
first module marked "20" contains the string:

Intel(R) RAID for SATA - v3.5.0.3003

The third module marked "20" contains:

FastTrak 378 (tm) BIOS Version 1.00.0.37
(c) 2003 Promise Technology

The second module is an Intel boot agent (PXE), and I don't
know what that is for. I don't know anything about whether
these are "good" RAID revisions or not.

People, on occasion, patch Asus BIOS to contain different
versions of these modules, and then flash upgrade the motherboard
BIOS with the new information. An example of this, was
when the SIL3112 was causing problems on some boards, and
the users were inserting new BIOS files from Silicon Image,
well before Asus could test and package them for release.

I've never been successful at patching an Asus BIOS - the BIOS
tend not to be "standard", implying there may be a few tricks
to getting the checksums to work on the files etc. In any case,
having a BIOS Savior with two flash chips on it, is an essential
ingredient to safely testing home-made BIOS files. If you visit
the private forums, you can sometimes find modded BIOS that
people have already tested, and I've successfully used one of
those files before.

Paul
 
PXE (Pre Boot eXexceution Environment) is a network bootloader a bit like
bootp. It includes dhcp client and I believe a kind of tft to start the boot
process. It is commonly used for Windows Server Remote Installation Service
for Windows XP and Server 2003 installation.

If you not using it, disable it as it will elongate boottimes greatly. It is
particularly common on intel server mobos.

See
http://www.microsoft.com/resources/...3/standard/proddocs/en-us/EMS_RIS_support.asp
for a little light reading...

- Tim
 
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