Tip of the day

[Steve]

Steve's tip of a day is a daily* feature in which I provide you guys with a tip.

Today's tip is:

Don't ever, EVER, take a BIOS image for your motherboard, rip a 3rd party integrated BIOS image from within it, and then replace said 3rd party image with an INCORRECT substitute.

Indeed, it turns out they don't like it when you do that.

Why pose such a tip today? Guess what I've been doing!

It turns out that the BIOS for the Silicon Image 3114 controller, embedded into the ASUS A8N SLI's BIOS, only supports RAID devices. That means you cannot just run a single drive off the controller. Well that's unlucky, because that's exactly what I want to do.

So, I went off to the ASUS website, grabbed the latest BIOS, then headed over to Silicon Image and grabbed their latest BIOS, fiddled around with CBROM to add a BIOS that was not RAID. However, I was silly enough to download the BIOS image from Sil that is for add-in cards, not embedded use. Whoops.

Long story short I recovered the BIOS, and now have the right image, ready to embed. If it works I'll let you know. I know I'm not the only one out there wanting single drive functionality on the Sil controller, but I'm not sure whether I'll be allowed to publish the file if it works.


* Lies

[TiG]

hehe, Steve i really do worry about you sometimes

TiG

[Lee H]

You must have WAY too much time on your hands to be figuring all this out

Haven't you got enough on your plate what with the 16 hours in Uni all week and the rest of the time watching Trisha and Richard Hammond?

[Steve]

New tip:

Don't ever embed PART of a 3rd party image into a BIOS file, when you're not certain you've got the right part... the image was "valid" but didn't work properly, which meant the auto-recovery didn't feel the need to kick in, and when the SiI BIOS was supposed to kick in I got a flashing cursor.

I thought I was stuffed, until I found hitting enter a few times cleared it. Phew. Back to the drawing board.

Ah, this is what being a CSE should be like

[Steve]

Got it working. Patched up to the latest version of the BIOS, discovered it was playing up with some old metadata on the drive, nuked that, and now all is well.