Hello again guys,
I have a ASUS Rampage III EXtreme, which is a x58 system (LGA1366) running on a Intel Xeon Hexa core cpu (Intel X5650). The board has an on board Renesas uPD720200F1, but the BIOS does not see USB 3.0 devices as bootable from this chipset. You CAN boot from the USB 3.0 ports, but ONLY using USB 2.0 devices. You can also boot from the USB 2.0 ports even using USB 3.0 devices, which defeats the purpose. I want to use USB 3.0 for Live Linux testing and faster OS installs. I have several friends who have the same exact USB 3.0 chip 720200F1 on their x58 boards and both of them can boot USB 3.0 devices from them no problem at all. My BIOS is based on AMI v2.61.
So, since it is obvious that my USB 3.0 chip allows 3.0 booting, how can I turn on this feature or fix my BIOS to allow for booting from 3.0 flash drives? Any ideas? Can the BIOS be modded to fix this perhaps?
Thank you
Rod
@SkOrPn :
Since I am not an expert at all regarding your problem, I hope, that anyone among our BIOS Gurus is able and willing to help you.
Good luck!
Yeah I think my board was not given the ability to use the USB 3.0 ports for booting because it was the first Motherboard with USB 3.0 and ASUS had no idea how at the time to enable this feature. Shortly afterwards, I think others figured it out and enabled within their bios’s. I am probably wrong, but after many years of testing I have come to the conclusion that my BIOS is missing necessary code to boot USB 3.0 devices from a USB 3.0 port.
This next week I should have a ASMedia USB 3.1 PCIe card in my hands and will again check to see if I can boot from it, which I am doubting already. I have tried many different format types, partition types and alignments but my USB 3.0 ports will NOT see USB 3.0 devices within the BIOS itself. After it boots to Windows or Linux I can then get great transfer rates of 255 MB/s reads and 130 MB/s writes, so I know the 3.0 ports work fantastic. In the BIOS they appear to be nothing more than 2.0 ports though. Really really really annoying me now. LOL
Please help if you can, anyone. Thank you
Well today I installed the ASMedia ASM1142 into the system. Sure enough the BIOS does NOT see any devices attached to it. This now makes 4 different chipsets, the on board Renesas (720200), an aftermarket newer Renesas (720201), a Via based chipset and now a ASMedia 3.1 chipset. My BIOS only see’s devices that are in native USB 2.0 mode.
Surely there must be a module I could install into the bios so it can see and use USB 3.0 and 3.1, right?
There are 2 ways typically used by BIOS for interfacing with USB controllers. The simplest is polling. Basically, every x microseconds, the BIOS will see if something happened on the controllers. The other is to have the controllers generate an SMI (system management interrupt)when there is an event to be handled. SMIs allow for USB devices to be used in DOS. Generally, only the USB controllers that are part of the chipset are generally able to signal an SMI. To have USB 3.0 on that board, Asus would have had to add an XHCI outside of the standard Intel chipset. It’s very rare for devices like that to be able to generate SMIs.
That board also appears to be from an era predating BIOS support for XHCIs in general.
If you were considering a pure UEFI boot, there are a couple UEFI drivers that need to exist first. Those are a stand alone XHCI driver and a block IO driver for the USB 3.0 mass storage class. If you were talking about a legacy boot, that’s not going to be possible at all because of how deep that support is embedded into a system.
I know of other boards built in the exact same year with the exact same usb chipset and it will boot ANY usb 3.0 bootable device that I attach to it. So its not the Intel chipset as both run the exact same X58 chipset, and its not the usb controller as both run the exact same usb controller (720200). It has to be something within the BIOS itself. I can put the exact same USB 3.0 flash drive with bootable media on it, and put it in this R3E USB 3.0 port and it doesn’t see the drive in the BIOS during boot (F8), but the exact same flash drive on the Gigabyte system boots it perfectly. Same CPU, same memory, same Intel chipset, the only difference I see is the brand of computer and of course the BIOS written for it.
So it is probably code in the Asus bios that is missing for this USB 3.0 chipset, but present in the Gigabyte boards bios. How do I yank that working code from the Gigabyte bios and install it into the Asus bios? Or is that not possible since Asus uses AMI and Gigabyte uses Award? Both boards have the uPD720200, and both have the same exact firmware already. Very confusing to me why one boots on the usb 3.0 and the other doesn’t.
A question: is should be possible that one of these cards supporting also 2.5 lane be integrated in a 4coredual-sata2 motherboard implementing their firmware into the ami bios of the motherboard? thanks.