David Mathog wrote: >> I'm assuming that the boffin Flextronics has handling legacy support for >> Arima is not being very responsive? > > If by "very" you mean "at all", then you would be accurate. > >> Well, editing the BIOS image for the mainboard seams kind of dodgy. > > That's what I ended up doing though, and it worked.
By any chance is the flash ROM socketed and did you have a spare board for hot swapping? That sort of insurance make's me breathe easier when doing weird firmware updates. >> If >> chassis space isn't a problem, I would think replacing the controller >> would be a better solution. > > That's an option for the one machine I moved to a different case, the > others I'm thinking about getting are in strange little cases, and they > will only have room for one disk, so just getting the one controller to > see a SATA II disk will be good enough. Yeah, so you were stuck. >> If you want to, find a copy of BNTBTC (Bog Number Two's BIOS Tools >> Collection) and install Phoenix Bios Editor. Hopefully you have no >> missing VBVM 6.0 files. You'll need to find the correct module for >> replacement. I was just checking the ROM image myself, but I was using >> an older BIOS editor and things were a little gnarly. We'll see with the >> new version... That would be Borg... > Found this thread: > > http://forums.mydigitallife.info/threads/13358-How-to-Use-New-Phoenix-Bios-Mod-Tool-to-Modify-Phoenix-Dell-Insyde-EFI-Bios-Files?s=016f5c20a0849a623a806a9a440db2fb > > with a link to PBE 2.1.0.0. Used that on the 1.11 BIOS (downloaded > from Flextronic), stuffed in the SiI stuff (5403.bin), flashed the ROM, > and it worked, seeing the SATA II disk. Note, there were two > complications. 1st, PBE installs owned by the installer, and there are > access issues, solved those by changing ownership to Everbody:FULL at > the top level of that directory tree. Second, replacing a module. I > tried that using the menu interface, and it seemed to have done it, but > the resulting BIOS still had the old SiI section. So used PBE to > unpack, from another window, copied 5403.bin to ....\TEMP\OPROM3.ROM > (where it lived in this BIOS), changed and unchanged a string to enable > the build command, then BUILD, then save BIOS. It seems BIOS modding has become somewhat of a cottage industry as a way of getting around WGA and/or being able to boot Windows 7. Examining the module binaries, I see they did us the favor of providing copyrights in the first line. Very considerate of them. Distinguishing between the various addon modules is easy this way. > Tried another tool called Phoenix_Tool_1.24 (from the thread cited > above) and it could break out the pieces of the BIOS, then you could > replace one, and run prepare and catenate. Except that what comes out > won't flash with phlash.exe. See my entry near the end of the forum > cited above. I used a little tool of mine called "intercept" to > intercept all program calls, and it wasn't doing anything special with > prepare.exe, catenate.exe, or the other programs. The only thing left > was that PBE itself must be appending some stuff after the catenate > output, and that seems to be metadata for phlash16. Probably one could > use another flash program that didn't need these, but I wasn't going to > try that. In any case, these appended bytes were the same when PBE > built an unmodified and a modified BIOS, so it would apparently be safe > to just use "dd" and hack the difference in length off the original BIOS > image and append it to the output from catenate. The phlash command I > used was: > > phlash16 HDAMAI.11C /C /Mode=3 /CS /EXIT /PN /V > > Since the legal status of these versions of PBE is somewhat dubious, I > didn't post these last few results in public anywhere. I won't tell if you won't. > Regards, > > David Mathog > mat...@caltech.edu > Manager, Sequence Analysis Facility, Biology Division, Caltech Hey, glad it's working. I guess the war horses will soldier on some more. -- Geoffrey D. Jacobs _______________________________________________ Beowulf mailing list, Beowulf@beowulf.org sponsored by Penguin Computing To change your subscription (digest mode or unsubscribe) visit http://www.beowulf.org/mailman/listinfo/beowulf
