Use Intel NIC PXE image mod for 2.1 SLIC?

Discussion in 'MDL Projects and Applications' started by SirSilentBob, Aug 25, 2009.

  1. SirSilentBob

    SirSilentBob MDL Senior Member

    Jun 5, 2009
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    #21 SirSilentBob, Sep 1, 2009
    Last edited by a moderator: Apr 20, 2017
    (OP)
  2. truthinjection

    truthinjection MDL Member

    Aug 27, 2009
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  3. SirSilentBob

    SirSilentBob MDL Senior Member

    Jun 5, 2009
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    #23 SirSilentBob, Sep 1, 2009
    Last edited by a moderator: Apr 20, 2017
    (OP)
  4. SirSilentBob

    SirSilentBob MDL Senior Member

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    I guess it just isn't going to work with the particular setup I have. :( Both files, when "restored" to the card result in the card's entry being lost in the BIOS and therefore not being able to be selected as a boot device. Its an old gateway DG845PT board, I believe. I guess this might be slightly motherboard dependent.
     
  5. truthinjection

    truthinjection MDL Member

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    Hrm. I took your sum00.flb file and made an 8086107c.iba 2KB file that you can try.

    Let me see if I can attach it here:
    View attachment 8086107c.zip

    Who made your BIOS?

    Good luck2!
    -truthinjection
     
  6. SirSilentBob

    SirSilentBob MDL Senior Member

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    Thanks, I'll give that a shot now!
    It is an intel/phoenix bios as far as I can tell. It uses the dos IFLASH.exe program to flash, and has a *.BIO file. All I know is I nearly bricked this board one time, because apparently there is both a regular DG845PT board, and also a Gateway DG845PT board. Of course, there is no way to make that determination, as both boards look the same and both have the same "DG845PT" model number on them! Luckily I was able to recover using the jumper/recovery disk method. Be back in a few, trying the 2KB file now.....
     
  7. SirSilentBob

    SirSilentBob MDL Senior Member

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    It worked!

    truthinjection, you are king!

    And thanks to everyone else who helped and gave tools to aid the process!
    You know who you are! (Yen, SkyCN123!)

    Upon loading that 2KB file to the card, I was pleasantly surprised at being greeted with a "SLIC Mod" boot option upon rebooting the computer. Looking at it with Everest in Winxp shows a SLIC table with HPQOEM! I am going to save the backed up file from the card from that 40gig drive, and load Windows 7 on it to give it a "real world" windows test. I'll report back upon doing that. The next thing that I wonder is how many different Intel NICs can this be used for? Your Gigabit card is a slightly different model than mine, I am wondering if any Intel card that will take a PXE image update will work with this. I am now going to see if the onboard Intel NIC can be updated. If so, then this really opens up lots of possibilities!
     
  8. truthinjection

    truthinjection MDL Member

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    Add-in boards are safe to toy with. Built-In ... not so much?

    Hehe. Thanks for the compliment; if only I had written the program. ;) All I can really claim credit for is truncating off the 62K of excess zeroes and moving a checksum bit within the image-length*512 limit (which I've looked, and the original source-code doesn't do, either, so I wonder how important it is/isn't.) The original BIOS standard for option roms was "check for 55AA on every 2K border", so it's entirely possible that it almost always works despite being technically past the listed 1.5K of real ROM code.

    Indeed! :)

    Kick ass. :)

    I think, with the possible exception of one goofy model of the gigabit chip, all of the intel 100BT and 1000BT add-in PCI (and theoretically PCIe) cards would work in exactly this way. Of course, currently, the little 2K thing gets rid of real PXE booting, which I happen to use from time to time, but most people don't care a whit about that, so for them, this is all upsides.

    CAREFUL with that one. Something tells me, at best, that's not likely to work [though perhaps Intel is smoother than most manufacturers?], because (usually) anything on-board shares the same Flash chip as the BIOS itself. I guess I can run a test on that really quick, but it seems like something doomed to have people looking for recovery jumpers. :eek: Of course, the Intel boards, whilst being terrible for overclocking, have the most beautiful BIOS (and especially CMOS) clearing jumpers I've seen. (My BoneTrail2 board has a jumper that basically tells it "go immediately into the bios without booting any goofy option roms so I can fix things." No fumbling with beeps and timing hitting the DEL key. Good stuff. :)

    Let me go cause myself some trouble.

    Back in a bit,
    -truthinjection
     
  9. SirSilentBob

    SirSilentBob MDL Senior Member

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    I tried to see if I could apply this to both a 10/100 onboard, and also a 10/100 onboard for a laptop. Both of them did not have a flash chip, so therefor it could not update the image. I think a lot of onboard intel cards do not have flash chips, probably to save on costs.

    I just installed Win7, inserted the Dell SLP, and then the COMPAQ-HP.XRM-MS cert file.

    Windows is activated. IT IS CONFIRMED WORKING!
     
  10. SirSilentBob

    SirSilentBob MDL Senior Member

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    Another question, I opened the 2KB file to view it. Can any SLIC be copied and pasted into that 2KB file over the existing one, if someone would want to change it? Or would this again throw off the checksum and require more calculating to be done? I am going to try and write a guide shortly that details using the DOS utility in conjunction with your 2KB file to allow others to do mods to their Intel NICs and have genuine Vista/7 for those with un-modable BIOS.
     
  11. truthinjection

    truthinjection MDL Member

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    Yeah, I think this could be useful for folks at least with desktops, but in general, the BIOS patching is usually better in that it's more permanent and free. ;)

    You can pretty much paste any SLIC over the one that's there, but you'll have to compute a new checksum byte every time you mess with anything.

    A better way to do it if you're going to write a full guide would probably be to use the original source code, and have people download the FASM compiler (technically, it's an assembler, but more people probably would call it a compiler ;) ). It doesn't seem to be too hard to install, and the assembly process takes literally half a second. That, and it would patch all the checksum junk probably.

    I took the original ASM source (with comments in english/chinese mixed comments) and ran the comments through a google translation. It's pretty icky from a being-able-to-understand-the-comments perspective, but it does compile. :)
     
  12. SirSilentBob

    SirSilentBob MDL Senior Member

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    Can you please when you have a few min PM me the details/steps taken to do that? I am editing the first post with a guide on how to flash the modded file to the Intel NIC through dos. Please view and give feedback at your leasure. I'd very much like to make a guide, showing step by step photos of the process and credit you as the tester/creator/writer, and put it in the first post as a guide to insert SLICs of one's choosing if they do not want to use the HPQOEM one you have already provided.
     
  13. mcw

    mcw MDL Novice

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    I just wanted to say that I'd rather do this method than the software methods - this is the closest thing to a BIOS flash I'll get with my DX58SO board right now. Awesome!
     
  14. tapmal5

    tapmal5 MDL Junior Member

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    Intel NIC Mod

    Will this work for onboard NIC on Intel Board because it is primarily helpful for them.I have Intel DG35EC board with
    Intel*R) 82566DC Gigabit Network Connection Card. It woulb be great if you could include a guide with necessary tools for it
     
  15. SirSilentBob

    SirSilentBob MDL Senior Member

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    #35 SirSilentBob, Sep 1, 2009
    Last edited: Sep 1, 2009
    (OP)
    Guide has been completed! Modding an On-board NIC is risky as truthinjection said, and the problem is that it seems a lot of the on board Intel NICs do not have a FLASH chip. You can try it though, and if yours has a flash chip, it should work.

    Go for it! Again, if you are trying to mod an on board NIC though, plz see the notes above I posted for tapmal5.

    Both of you: As always, please post your results, and if it works let us know what NICs you used so we can update the list of known working NICs.
     
  16. Orbiting234

    Orbiting234 MDL Member

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    Oh sure, now you have a whole guide lol.

    Last night when I did this to an old PRO/100+ Server Adapter I had buried away in a pile of unused parts, I was able to get it up and running with just a quick mod of the iba to it's device ID.
     
  17. Serxavi

    Serxavi MDL Novice

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  18. tapmal5

    tapmal5 MDL Junior Member

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    there seems to be an extraction error with Intel NIC PXE SLIC Mod.7z
     
  19. Orbiting234

    Orbiting234 MDL Member

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  20. dvdmkr

    dvdmkr MDL Novice

    May 29, 2009
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    Error extracting .7z file

    When I'm extracting it, I get this error

    Unsupported compression method for MOD.iba
    Unsupported compression method for IBAUtil.exe

    Need help on this file please..

    Thanks!