Hello,

WS: Dell Studio XPS 8100, W7 Ultimate, SP1, Intel i5, 16 GB RAM
Intel RST: V 13.2.4.1000
Ctrl-I BIOS says: 9.5.0.1037

I am trying to upgrade my 2 TB drives to 4 TB WD drives in RAID 1 by plugging a 4 TB one at a time and letting the RAID 1 rebuild. This time the rebuild wont start and marks the 4 TB drive as available but not rebuildable.
I was able to do this when I went from 1 TB to 2 TB drives.

The Ctrl-I BIOS says the 4 TB drives are only 1.6 TB where the 2 TB are stated as 1.8 TB.

On the forum a member says that an upgrade to BIOS 11.2.0.1527 has addressed this problem in the past.
How do I update the BIOS itself to 11.2.0.1527? I would think that the Intel RST V 13.2.4.1000 would have replaced the BIOS to a more recent version.

Great forum. Hope I am giving enough info to get some assistance.

I also have an XPS 8100. I managed to get the 963D1P28.BIN (1024KB) bios file extracted from the S8100-A05.EXE file downloaded from Dell.

However, none of the tools recognize the .BIN (even when I rename them to .ROM). UBU gets me the closest by displaying "Unknow Versiom AMI Aptio" - obvious typo's in the program itself.

The board is an Intel H57 Chipset with an Intel RST ICH8R RAID controller (also ver v9.5.0.1037 like the OP). I'm running RST 15.2.0.1020 on a Windows 10 Pro system.

So, none of the tools on this site let me mod the 963D1P28.BIN to update the related RAID BIOS.

Thoughts?!

Thanks

Danke, Fernando!

See attached.

Found MMTool.

When I load the .ROM file, I get "Error Loading Firmware Image (800000001h)"

Ok, I feel like I'm close.

I successfully removed the OEM Logo. Saved. Replaced the RAID ROM with the one you listed (from your other thread). Saved.

Then, because Dell packaged their BIOS's into an .EXE, I was able to grab all of the files originally from the TEMP directory they were extracted to. I don't think I can put them back into the .EXE so I used the utility within the updater "MEFlashTool."

It looked like it was going to work, but it errors out. It shows:

Current Version: 6.0.31.1208
New Version: 933.57475.2823.35784

Says it's updating, goes to 100% but then a pop-up says "Update ME failed! Error 8713: Firmware update not initiated due to an invalid FW image"

This happened with the BIOS after removing OEM and with the on that had the RAID ROM replaced.

I feel like there's another setting or value in the BIN/ROM that needs to be edited so that the updater thinks it has a valid image.

Thoughts?

I uploaded my new .BIN for you to look at, along with the utility and log files.

I tried again, selecting ID 20, choosing the "Replace" tab, selecting the file "8086-2822_v11201527_mod-for-TRIM-in-RAID0.bin" and clicked "Replace"

The source size and size in ROM values changed, which led me to believe that the ROM updated successfully. But I get the same error.

Just in case I sent the wrong one to you, here's the one I just changed.

Thank you so much for your time and patience.

Good. But the result is the same.

Perhaps the MEFlashTool that I extracted from the Dell Package isn't what I should be using.

Just in case you're in the mood, I uploaded the S8100-A05.EXE contents in a RAR file so that you can see what I'm working with - including the updated .BIN.

Perhaps a different FlashTool (not from Dell) would work better?

Fernando,

I took a break for a while from this effort but started looking into it again, as I was upgrading my drives with 3TB drives. I was on the original v9.5.0.1037 OROM and the drives showed up as ~700GB drives in the BIOS utility (Ctrl-I at bootup), but showed up in Windows 10 with their actual sizes. However the RAID 1 I setup in the BIOS wasn't visible in the RST utility in Windows.

I found AFUWINx64.exe and was able to successfully flash the modded BIOS into the system.

Once I did that, the Ctrl-I functionality was gone at bootup and I was unable to create a RAID array. The Windows RST Utility identified everything that plugged in correctly.

I tried v10.5.1.1070 and v11.2.0.1527 but still no go.

Also, all the utilities that I've used to examine the hardware on my system show it having an ICH8 chipset (Intel ICH8/PCH - SATA RAID 0/1/5 Controller) - NOT an ICH8R, which is all I see listed in the main page of the ROM thread.