Does it support the old ICH10R? Any info for this ROM? Thanks.

Hi Fernando,

Great forum and highly valuable information, thanks a lot for sharing. Please feel free to move my message to another more related thread if needed. I have an ASUS P6T SE (AMI bios non-UEFI), with ICH10R intel controller. I have recently bought two 3TB HDDs hoping to set them up in RAID 1, but found out that the old version of the controller firmware (FW) does not support more than 2TB. I spent a couple of hours, reading most of the related stuff here, and decided to give it a try by modding the 0908 BIOS that contain 8.0.0.1038 OROM to 11.2.0.1527 without success (I think this was also reported by other members). The computer gets stuck at the Intel RST boot manager with a black screen and blinking cursor.

1. Could you please point me to how people recover/restore their BIOS ? In my case, it was not going into the BIOS/EZ FLASH (as it happens after the RST boot manager, and it got stuck before that). What I did was I cleared the CMOS/BIOS settings using the jumper on the motherboard which disabled the RAID and then I was able to get into the BIOS and restore the flash to the stock image. Is there a better way ?
2. MMTool did not give me any error when replacing the PCI Option ROM, but it did move around almost all the other objects after that, not sure if that was the cause of the failure. But does that mean that I have enough empty space in the BIOS image ?
3. Another likely cause for the failure is the FW loader of RST not handling the bigger size of the OROM, if that is the case, the loader part should also be changed.
4. I have a pretty good amount of experience in hardware/low level software, but I have never done anything for BIOS, it would be great if you can point me to a few more advanced references, including the following
4.1 Does BIOS run on the main processor (i7 for example) ? I need to know if it is using x86 opcodes in order to disassemble it and know what it is doing.
4.2 It seems BIOS objects are compressed, so it has to be decompressed somewhere, does it use the DDR3 RAM, or it uses some dedicated SRAM in the motherboard ?
4.3 The above issues might be caused by some bugs in the MMTool, is the BIOS structure standard/open source ? Is there any information about its format ?
4.4 Any other information/pointers to AMI non-UEFI BIOSes and Intel RAID controller ROMs is very much appreciated.

Thanks a lot in advance,

@z258_14

You should ignore the module relocation in MMTool. It tends to place the uncompressed modules in front and then sort the modules based on size, decreasing. And the BIOS space is not a problem, unless MMTool actually tells you so. The compression is also not important, there are other bigger modules that are compressed and have no problem. There is one compression (custom EFI/Tiano, probably) for each module, not individual settings for each one. Your BIOS file actually has the same order of modules as in MMTool (pointer based), which is not that common from my tests. You can see there is plenty of space between last module (80 - Image Information) and the Extended Boot Block (EBB).



The real issue is in memory allocation, they just didn't thought of OROMs bigger than 64KB at that time. You need to be a master in assembly and you have three options:
- get a copy of the sources for your BIOS and fix the problem yourself. In my point, the main target is 1B module (System BIOS). It is impossible to fix this just by disassembly and patching, it is equally impossible to get the sources.
- make the memory allocation from the ROM. There is the option of PMM request that can handle memory allocation. But there is not much space in the RAID ROM to do this.
- do what iPXE does, and use a small image to pass the POST and add the RAID ROM as a payload or as a second image linked to the first one. I would say this is the best option from the three. You have iPXE sources and the way in this file, if you can make it work.

But the manufacturer doing it for you is the best solution.

Fernando, thanks for the confirmation. I have already contacted ASUS, let's see how they respond (I personally do not have that much hope in them). I saw something related to GPT/MBR in the net. Does it mean that if I am booting from another disk, I can format them in windows but still have a RAID 1 through hardware ? Or with my current setup the only option is a software RAID ?

lordkag, thank you very much for the helpful pointers. I may not be a master in assembly, but have a pretty good amount of experience and was planning to dig into the BIOS image and see what I can find. If the real issue is just the loader not being able to load more than 64k image, that should be quite easy to fix. I seem to have quite a bit of reading/learning to do over the coming weekend !

I will get back here if I find anything.

Hi Fernando,
I have a Toshiba A200 laptop with 2x SATA 2.5 bays (yes, it's rare) and the latest Phoenix BIOS from the Toshiba website http://support.toshiba-tro.de/tedd-files...90121132645.zip
The SATA controller of this laptop is Intel ICH8M AHCI, which doesn't support RAID, unfortunately (I've checked in BIOS, there's no such thing as RAID there).
I was wondering if it's possible to update/add a PCI ROM to the BIOS that would somehow enable SATA RAID on this laptop. Would it be possible ?

Also, another question, in case the above RAID is not possible: is it possible to update the current Intel AHCI ROM in this BIOS ? Your first post says:
The function and the compatibility of the "Intel(R) SATA AHCI Controller" obviously is managed by a "normal" (non-OROM) BIOS module, which cannot resp. don't need to be updated.
Does it mean that the Intel SATA AHCI ROM cannot be updated ? Please give me more details, I'm very interested in understanding how this works. Thank you !

Zitat von Fernando im Beitrag #684

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As already written above: The Intel AHCi ROM can only be updated, when such module is present within the BIOS and older than v1.20E.

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Hello,
I would like to update my marvell 9128 firmware, but the bootloader and firmware download links on win-lite.de are down. Could you please reup that?

Thanks

@ Fernando
Hello,
I can download the firmware now, but the link to the bootloader download within the start post is still redirecting me to win-lite. I also cant find the bootloader on OneDrive.

Kind regards

@Fernando
Hallo Dieter,
ich danke dir. Gut, dass es diese Seite gibt.

Grüße

Translated by Fernando:
"Hello Dieter,
I want to thank you. It is fine, that this site exists.
Greetings"