On Thu, 28 Jul 2011 23:27:02 +0300 "Amr H. El-Sharnoby" amr.el.sharnoby@gmail.com wrote:
Hi, Yes, I've done BIOS upgrade using flashrom ... It said that update was "verified" so I've rebooted. I've that the system booted successfully, I'm running ubuntu. But the Ethernet nic was not working. It reported a strange MAC address, and always reported "cable connected no" to ethtool .. To recover the problem, I've tried to redo the upgrade using ASUS EZ FLASH utility, but it didn't solve the problem. So I tried to downgrade the BIOS using ASUS utility, but again it didn't help. Finally, I used flashrom itself again and restored the BIOS backup I've taken using flashrom itself, the problem was solved and network worked fine again with the same normal MAC. Then I performed the BIOS upgrade using ASUS utility and it worked fine.
By the way, I've tried some different Linux distros as LiveCD when the network was not working to make sure that it is not an OS problem. And it was a BIOS problem indeed.
thanks amr for the explanation. flashrom has worked correctly on your board. the problem is probably that the PCI rom or some settings for the realtek network chip is stored together with the BIOS code in the flash and the vendor image does not contain meaningful defaults for the MAC address. the asus utility probably reads out the MAC address of the NIC before writing the new image. after you have written the vendor image with flashrom the information was lost until you wrote the backup again. that's also the reason why the asus tool did not work for recovery.
some forum posts (http://ubuntuforums.org/showthread.php?t=1534389) indicate that resetting the CMOS RAM may have solved the issue without all the flashing.
i have marked the chipset as supported, because obviously writing and reading works correctly. i have also added the board as unsupported and added a note explaining everything.
Thanks a lot,
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Amr H. El-Sharnoby -
Stefan Tauner