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Kooty's TechnoBabble is a blog by Brennan Kootnekoff, and is about the interesting day-to-day life of a multi-platform systems engineer/administrator. From time to time, he will post useful tidbits of information here that may save hours of time, and prevent premature gray hairs and aging.
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March 2nd, 2008. comments are open 0 commentsTyan K8WE Option ROM Issue

A few nights ago, I needed to get a couple Promise FastTRAK SATA RAID cards because my onboard ones just weren’t cutting it. I connect them to my PCI32 3.3V slots, boot up my system, and it goes through the whole detection process for my JBOD disks. Then it tells me that there is not enough Optional ROM space to continue…. WHAT?! I mean this is a $500+ board we are talking about here! Not enough space?! Give me a break.

Tyan K8WE Motherboard

I was running BIOS version 1.03, and there didn’t seem to be any fixes related to the BIOS looking at the updates, but I decided to upgrade to 1.05 just for the hell of it.

No Luck.

I tried disabling all the on-board features (SATA, SCSI, MAC PXE OptROM), and it still errored out on me. Why should I even have to try that on a high-end, server-class board.

No Luck.

I ended up taking one card out, configuring the RAID, and switching the cards and configuring the other one. Then I put both cards in, disabled the OptROM Boot Error Check, and just living with the issue. But why should a board of this class have issues like this? I’m seriously tempted to phone Tyan to get a replacement board or some kind of solution for their crappy-ass quality control.

Brennan

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