so I have an asus m2n68am with a nforce 7050/630a chipset.
My bios only picks up my 3tb hdd as a 700mb hdd and I wish to update the raid/ahci option rom.
inside the rom is 4 option roms with a nividia vendor id as follows I opened them up with a hex editor and below is the information:
053B (MCP68 VGA BIOS Version 5.67.32.26.00 )
053E ( MCP68 VGA BIOS Version 5.67.32.26.00)
0558 (MediaShield ROM BIOS 10.0.0.34)
054C (NVIDIA Boot Agent249.0542)
so I believe I can update to MediaShield ROM BIOS to version 10.0.0.35 is this correct ?
can I update the rest and is it worth it ?
I have downloaded this rom do I just need to intergrate this rom in my bios using mmtool I don’t need to do any hex editing or something ?
is there a soft boot bios method like relokick on the amiga to try out my bios patch with out risk ?
also why is there two identical vga option roms in the bios?
Also of note if I enable ahci port 1 is channel 1 port 2 ir channel 2 3-3 etc… but if I enable raid mode port 1 is 2 port 2 is channel 1 and they are all muddled up.
It also seems to have bugs with smart listing the wrong drive as faulty also as I have a failing drive and it list the wrong port and drive as faulty on bootup., will changing the option rom fix these issuies?
There also seems to have problems with acpi with linux and I have to disable the power saving options to boot up is this generally just a bad bios build?
on a side note I use the windows standard ahci driver as the nforce drivers wont pick up my full capacity of my 3tb and 4tb hdd is there a driver that will work with I have tried a few and no luck.
@ professor_jonny:
Welcome at Win-RAID Forum!
I doubt, that this will solve your problem.
Questions:
1. Have the NVIDIA nForce SATA ports been set to AHCI or RAID mode?
2. Which OS are you running?
This is correct, but the result will not be worth the efforts and risks.
When the v10.0.0.34 OROM doesn’t support >2 TB HDDs, what lets you think, that the v10.0.0.35 OROM does it?
Although I am not sure about it, I doubt, that you will benefit from an update.
As first step you should extract the original MediaShield ROM v10.0.0.34, open it with an Hex Editor and look for the code of the nForce SATA Controller DeviceID. If it is the same DeviceID as the newer ROM has, you can replace the RAID ROM without any Hex editing.
I don’t know.
You should ask NVIDIA, not us.
No.
When NVIDIA stopped their chipset production, no >2 TB HDDs were available. So there was no need to develop nForce SATA drivers and OROM modules, which do support them.
Regards
Dieter (alias Fernando)
the ports are in AHCI mode and I’m running vista x64.
I have an add on raid card with the 3 and 4tb drives attached which was pulled out of a hp ml330 server (temporally) as I was getting problems getting the correct capacity with the nforce drivers.
I have extracted the rom and opened in a hex editor but I can’t find an id not that I know what i’m looking for.
but looks like I might be best to stick as I am but buy a cheap add on card as editing the rom wont fix the problem any way but I did hope it may fix the smart bugs.
In this case the update of the MediaShield (NVIDIA RAID) ROM doesn’t help at all, because it will not been used.
I agree with you, but the best solution would be to replace your mainboard by an Intel chipset one.
Your BIOS and the Option ROM both don’t support hard disks >2TB.
You could use a SATA addon card, but you can’t use a graphics card if you choose a PCIe based one.
There sure are PCI based ones out there, but I don’t know if they support those HDDs.
Otherwise replace your mainboard, CPU and RAM. In other words, the whole platform.