HP N36L/N40L/N54L Microserver Updated AHCI BIOS Support.

geoff.sim

FYI I am running WHS 2011 with the latest modified ROM, and I can reboot just fine with the supplied 250GB disk in the top slot, and one drive (currently) in the 4-bay area. The 250 is the boot disk.

aws1971

can someone explain me what the settings in the bios mean in the part:
south bridge > chipset >  "SATA PORT 4/5 IDE Mode"

must it be on disabled or enabled for AHCI mode ?

richardb70

Hoping someone who's recently flashed their BIOS with the recent "hack" (N36L/N40L) can confirm for me how to check it's all good from WHS2011's perspective.

The reason I'm asking is that mine's all headless after I flashed and it's hassle for me to hook up a monitor again.

I'm looking in Device Manager and can see "IDE ATA/ATAPI controllers", with:
- ATA Channel 0 to
- ATA Channel 5
- Standard AHCI 1.0 Serial ATA Controller

The driver dates for all of these are MS ones from 2006 (!). Is this OK?

Installed my SSD up in the optical bay, if I right-click on it it's saying it's Channel 5, and ATA Channel 5 is reporting an ATA Disk, UDMA Mode 5 under it's Advanced Settings.

The reason I'm curious is my SSD seems a little sluggish (using a Crucial 64Gb), especially when coming out of hibernation. All suggestions welcome!

reevesy

does anyone know how to update the network drivers...

i've win 7

Ethernet NIC NetXtreme Server Driver Downloads | Broadcom

clicking on the zip file just brings up the licence agreement

my current one is :
'broadcom netxtreme gigabit ethernet properties' in device manager...it says microsoft driver ver 10.100.4.0....dated 2009

was hoping this could cure some hd streaming problems

cheers

jimbosis

Just wanted to note that RAID 10 now appears to work as a result of the BIOS update which pleases me greatly.

I activated RAID 10 from RaidXpert a while back but the array failed on reboot since the original BIOS was 1 or 0 only. I ended up turning BIOS RAID off and mirroring the drives in software. When I updated the BIOS I decided to go back to BIOS RAID and after rebooting the RAID interface showed the 4 drives in RAID 10 as set up in RAIDXpert. As my kids say - w00t. I've crash-tested the array and, indeed, it functions just the way a RAID 10 array should.

Much appreciated.

ahmavfahm

Just a quick 'thanks' to all in this thread.

I have an old N36L (so old I didn't get the cash back!) with the original BIOS.

I used TheBAY's patched BIOS image, and jzaw's suggestion of flashrom, to update the BIOS.  Although I could have done it right inside CentOS (which the box is running - and which can get flashrom easily via EPEL), instead I just made a bootable SystemRescueCD USB flash drive, which already includes flashrom, copied the image to it, booted, and ran flashrom fine.

On first reboot, I had to disable the IDE mode on ports 5 and 6, and also change the hard drive boot order to have disc 5 at the top of the list, in the BIOS, and then everything worked.  My system drive happens to contain two (degraded) mdadm RAID 1 mirrors for /boot and /, so grub and fstab refer to the md devices instead of hdb.  During boot, CentOS correctly restarted these arrays, now on /dev/sde instead of /dev/hdb as-was, and all carried on fine.

Edit: And the previously useless eSATA port (which would only work with drives plugged in at boot time) is now hot-pluggable.

Thanks

Marty Moose

Hoping somebody who isn't a technophobe like me can offer a bit of advice here.

After using the HP software to create the USB stick it wouldn't work and just kept replicating the contents of my downloads fille to the USB.  After raking around on my hard drive, I appear to have located the files in a folder named as 'USB Key'.  I have transfered these files direct to USB and swapped the .ROM file with the one available at the start of the thread.  When I'm booting though, I'm getting the message 'Cannot load DOS!'  The BIOS settings are set to boot from USB as priority, although when the stick is not plugged in the server will boot with no problems to the original WHS2011 I have on the 250g HD.

Marty Moose

Got there in the end after about five attempts at mixing and matching files from the USB and the hard drive, more by luck than anything else.

spinaltap

Does WHS 2011 have 'screen sharing' capability?

On my Mac Mini Server, for example, I can activate screen sharing so that I can control the server remotely via my iPad.

Avalon One

One of the many remote desktop apps will do the  job giving you full access via iPad.