Loss of MegaRAID support in BIOS rev 1010 on PR-DLS533/RACK

[Jason C. Lamb]

Does any one else have a PR-DLS533/RACK board?

Mine was shipped running BIOS rev 1008 and a green PCI-X slot that
seems to support the LSI MegaRAID 320-0 card. Working fine so far,
with RAID 1/RAID 10/RAID 1 arrays

After updaing to BIOS rev 1010 I lost support for this card, the BIOS
doesn't even see the LSI MegaRAID card during POST.

If I take the MegaRAID card out, the BIOS does recognize the on board
LSI SCSI, and I can revert back to rev 1008, but I need the fixes
introduced in rev 1010!

Any one else using this board?

 

[Paul]

Does any one else have a PR-DLS533/RACK board?

Mine was shipped running BIOS rev 1008 and a green PCI-X slot that
seems to support the LSI MegaRAID 320-0 card. Working fine so far,
with RAID 1/RAID 10/RAID 1 arrays

After updaing to BIOS rev 1010 I lost support for this card, the BIOS
doesn't even see the LSI MegaRAID card during POST.

If I take the MegaRAID card out, the BIOS does recognize the on board
LSI SCSI, and I can revert back to rev 1008, but I need the fixes
introduced in rev 1010!

Any one else using this board?

I examined the Award BIOS files for release 08 and 10, and both
versions of the 10 file, are missing a module named "LSI103~5.ROM".
I think that explains your loss of hardware functionality.

Depending on your degree of urgency versus dependable results,
there are tools like CBROM215, CTMC (contains splitawd, lha)
that can be used to extract LSI103~5.ROM from the 08 release,
and insert that module into the 10 release. Here are some
examples of hacking with these tools. You would get a copy
of the 08 bios file, extract the LSI module from that,
and insert it into 10. You might be able to do all of this
with CBROM or you may need the assistance of CTMC (from
ftp.heise.de magazine site).

http://tipperlinne.com/bios6b4.htm

ftp://ftp.heise.de/pub/ct/ctsi/ctmc10.zip

The best answer is to contact Asus tech support and get them to
put it back.

I'd give a recipe myself, but I don't have enough confidence in
these tools, to be flashing hardware, unless the owner of the
hardware has a BIOS Savior (ioss.com.tw) or equiv hardware, to
be able to escape from badly prepared BIOS files. You'd be
doubly pissed if the hardware was made completely useless to you,
until you got a backup BIOS chip from badflash.com

******
It appears my favorite site for CBROM is no longer serving up the
files. Guess the lawyers or the internet download bill got to him.
Here is the release info web page from that site, which luckily I
archived...

"VERSION DATE
CBROM v1.12C 1997
CBROM v1.13a 1997
CBROM v1.24C 1998
CBROM v1.26B 1998
CBROM v1.30 1999
CBROM v1.30B 1999
CBROM v1.30C 1999
CBROM v1.32 1999
CBROM v6.02B 1999
CBROM v6.06 1999
CBROM v2.01A 1999
CBROM v2.07 2000
CBROM v2.08 2000
CBROM v2.15 2001

Award BIOS users now have the choice of using a program other than
CBROM to do their modification work. The program is called
"Awardmod" and is written under the GPL. This program WILL work
with both the 256K Award 4.xx BIOS and the new Medallion
BIOS that CBROM simply won't work with. can be downloaded from
it's homepage on Sourceforge."

Searching on Abxzone, for cbrom or awardmod, may dig up more info
and perhaps links to the tools themselves.

http://abxzone.com/forums/search.php

Good luck,
Paul

 

[Jason C. Lamb]

Paul,

Thank you for the through advise. I did take a look at the
different revisions of the bios and noticed the blatent absence of the
LSI module in Rev1010 of the BIOS. In fact I compared my copy of
rev1008 of the bios to the one ASUS has on their ftp site and they
wern't the same.

I concidered for 1/2 a second hacking together a rev1010 BIOS that
had MegaRAID support but concidering this was going into a production
server I wisely decided against that approach.

I did contact ASUS and all that they would admit to is mistakingly
including support for the MegaRAID card in the rev1008 BIOS for the
RACK board. They said that the PR-DLS533/Rack never was supposed to
support the LSI MegaRAID card! Which I think is strange since they
have a PCI-X slot for it.

I ended up returning the PR-DLS533/Rack in exchange for a
PR-DLS533/2GBL. Lucky for me I was putting it in a 5U rack that
didn't need a riser card.

I'm not too impressed with ASUS's marketing department and product
literature. The number of different versions of the
PR-DL(S)533/RACK/GBL/2GBL/... is very confusing and to even determine
the different feature set is nearly impossible. The server tech guys
that I talked to wern't even sure what the RACK board should support
and refered to a picture in a catalog to tell me that MegaRAID was not
supported!

Hopefully this board will server long and hard...

Jason C. Lamb