Up ... Please !!! help me resolving this horrible issue !!! I would be very grateful (Paypal donation) to someone who could try to solve this problem. Thanks !
Hi all, I now know what the modder will have to do. It appears that the problem is located on the available memory residing on the Option ROM. The RAID SAS card that i want to get booting appears to have an "Option Rom" to load that is larger than the available BIOS free size. Is it easily possible to tweak this thing inside of a BIOS ? Thanks !
We had a similar problem several years ago using 2 pcie software raid cards on a server board when the sec card was installed it would not load it's bios, turning off unused server options failed to free up space in the servers bios space we had to replace both cards with another one that had the 4 ide ports but a diffrent rom which would load. the problem is that the servers available free space for add on rom's is conflicting with the space the sas card wants to use. the best solution is to either change the sas card for ont that is qualified by dell/card maker to work or........keep the card and replace the motherboard, which usually means a os reinstall as a last resort....does the card have a option to disable the onboard bios? if so can you manage the card using the vendor supplied software as a non bootable card that gets added to the system after the os boots? it's not a trivial task to attempt to rewrite the sas cards bios i would not want to do this on any production system since any further vendor updates for that card would again require you to fiddle with trying to get it to work and to do this you would need to know the full address range the sas cards bios occupies and the address range of the servers bios to see where it's trying to load
never said it did, what i said was the servers bios free space for addin cards roms was smaller than the rom on the addin sas card. to resolve you either need to free up more space in the servers space used for addin card roms by possibly removing unused modules (just what is uneeded is up for interpretation) or by rewriting the sas cards bios which is a major undertaking all computers have the ability to load addin cards bios's and merge them with the computers bios. the amount of free space a computer has for addin cards is mostly determined by what fearures it has onboard. IE- a board with onboard video, SAS, IDE, RAID, dual network jacks,... will have less space for addin cards than a system without any of the above. sometimes, disabling a onboard item will free up it's resources (onboard video being a prime example) sometimes not, again some motherboards would not allow disabling the onboard video. the dell in question here does not free up the unused resources, it simply marks them unavailable, but keeps the space as in use before trying to fix this you will need to know what the computers largest block of free space for addin cards is then determine what the sas card wants for it's rom and see if it's even possible to get the free space servers come with pre qualified expansion cards for just this reason, to make sure the item works as advertised. going outside the list means that you assume all risks of useability/stability. for home use this isn't a major issue, but servers/workstations in business use are another matter
I may misunderstood you but you wrote Anyway rewriting option rom isn't so a dark art. In fact an option rom is just a few lines in asm. The problem is to have a good developement thing and a progammer or a rescue method in case the flash went wrong. But you need also plenty of time and good place to work.