Recently acquired a few Dell Precision t5820 workstations. Unfortunately they came from Dell with ME disabled and i would love to enable it for KVM purposes. Been reading the procedures above and trying to see if i can get this to work. The first hurdle I came across is that i get a 318 error when trying to dump the existing BIOS. In searching the forums, there was mentions of a service mode jumper, but i cannot locate that on the motherboard. I also read another thread that mentioned a CH341A programmer to perform the reads and writes. is that the only option for this motherboard?
There might be just the pads for the jumper and they might work or not.
Regarding unlocking the flash descriptor:
CH341:
Otherwise are you correct that the procedure resembles the ‘cleaning procedure’ just with one additional steps - changing the required settings.
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D’oh, i’ve been staring at that area of the board for hours and never saw the service mode descriptor above the CMOS jumper. my board looks more like your last image where the service mode does not have jumper pins. will experiment shorting them with something.
thank you for all the info, will continue to read and see what i can come up with
ok, next hurdle! i was able to set the 5820 into service mode which allowed me to download the firmware. Step 4 of the guide says to get the firmware file that matches the version. Version on my machine is 11.12.95.2499, but the latest one in the repository shows 11.12.92.2222. i searched the forums to see if there was a later version to match and found one in this post. Problem is that firmware shows a File System State of Unconfigured which does not match step 5 in the guide. should i try it with the 11.12.92 version or try to figure out this latest version that actually matches?
Step 5 in section D4 covers ME in your own dump? That one should indeed have a configuration.
yep, I’m an idiot… i read that as using the downloaded firmware. All steps seem to have worked and the updated firmware was pushed to the machine per the instructions. My goal was to enable AMT so i could do KVM on these machines, but it appears that those options are still disabled.
What is the hardware configuration- chipset, cpu, graphics, nic?
Attach the complete firmware or at least ME region.
First, thank you very much for all the help already provided, I really appreciate it. Here is the info
Chipset: Intel C422
CPU: Xeon W-2245
graphics: AMD Radeon r9 M360
NIC: Intel i219-LM
Here is the original bios dump:
dell03_orig.rar (9.5 MB)
Here is the modified one:
outimage.rar (9.3 MB)
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I can’t find any differences in configuration? The two attached firmwares are identically configured?
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KvmSupported value=“No” … If this setting have been set to disabled it cannot be re-enabled once the descriptor has been locked.
It’s unclear what this means, afaik the only setting that’s written permanently into FPFs for ME 11 is the formware TPM? -
Normally processor graphics is used to redirect screen content to KVM, but officially this Xeon doesn’t have a graphics unit. But may there’s something ‘unofficially’ hidden just to serve AMT?
Please double check the Flash descriptor, ist mostly PCH straps that are stored there, but just to be sure!
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As far as the flash descriptor, i was able to dump the firmware via fpt -d and then i turned around and updated it with the downloaded on via fpt -f without any errors which leads me to believe the descriptors are RW enabled. let me try the process again, maybe I screwed up the settings on the updated firmware.
EDIT: SUCCESS! I repeated the steps with the original dump, but this time i saw a post around additional configuration settings in FIT. these seemed to do the trick on my workstation.
Now i just need to figure out why the NIC is no longer working…
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Thanks for the feedback. I don’t think these 2 values are relevant.
Regarding NIC:
- GbE written back correctly?
- Other changes in FIT?
- Checked old FD against new FD?
I didn’t make any changes in the Networking region, though in checking the original dump to the cleaned one, i do see that the GbE PCIe Port Select changed from PORT4 to PORT5. I’m going to update that and try again.
Would you mind posting the cleaned firmware?
here is the one that is currently on the machine, i have not changed the port yet.
Dell03_outimage.zip (9.8 MB)
Thanks. I see you did a lot of changes.
MctpDevicePortEc, FwAutoBist, EhbcEnable- Unclear what you want to achieve?
OemPublicKeyHash, BtGuardProfileConfig, PttSupportedHw - These values are burnt into the PCH at ‘close manufacturing’, Since it’s a Dell they certainly didn’t deliver the machine still in manufacturing mode, so this can only be resolved by exchanging the PCH with a new, unconfigured one.
well, that is strange since i didn’t make any changes to any other regions myself. maybe the clean ME region i downloaded was corrupt? Literally All i did in my first try was to dump the bios, merge the clean region and flashed it. that didn’t work, so then i took the original bios dump, merged the same clean ME region and in FIT changed the settings in the ME section then flashed it. I had not even browsed the other sections that were changed.
Then you didn’t follow the guide- those items are too specific and too far away from FIT standard settings to have happened accidentally. Maybe another xml- config from a modified dump ‘lying around’?
I use to compare the xml files - original and modified - in Notepadd ++, the compare plugin works well:
(But there are lots of other diff tools that can compare xml files properly…)
Otherwise it’s wise to have just the things you want to work with in the FIT directory…
ok, going back to the drawing board. Just flashed thew original firmware and all systems look normal. going to go through the process and capture images between the stages to see where it may be going wrong.