[ipxe-devel] iPxe ruined my TG3 cards and motherboard :(

[freebsd at tango.lu]

On 2020-01-30 20:31, Christian Nilsson wrote:
> On Thu, 30 Jan 2020 at 20:09, <freebsd at tango.lu> wrote:
>> 
>> Hello,
>> 
>> I had an older Tyan S4882 with the following onboard NICs:
>> 
>> 02:09.0 Ethernet controller [0200]: Broadcom Corporation NetXtreme
>> BCM5704 Gigabit Ethernet [14e4:1648] (rev 03)
>> 02:09.1 Ethernet controller [0200]: Broadcom Corporation NetXtreme
>> BCM5704 Gigabit Ethernet [14e4:1648] (rev 03)
>> 
>> I have built the rom:
>> 
>> 78848 Jan 29 18:22 14e41648.rom
>> 
>> and followed the TG3 guide: https://ipxe.org/howto/romburning/tg3
>> 
>> Got the latest ipxe from git, built my rom.
>> I have only flashed card 0.
>> The flashing process was successful.
>> 
>> After reboot I noticed that iPXE is in the BIOS as it should but when
>> trying to boot from iPXE the monitor signal goes out then the board 
>> goes
>> into POS 06 and constantly beeps like an ambulance. Same thing happens
>> when I tried to go into the iPXE control panel with CTRL+B at boot. So
>> any time the motherboard try to boot from iPXE it dies.
>> 
>> To make things WORSE this is NOT just affecting the boot rom but the 
>> NIC
>> itself got screwed up as well. For example I tried to copy larger 
>> amount
>> of data through it in Linux and same thing happened, monitor turned 
>> off
>> and the board died with error code 06.
>> 
>> 
>> So what I have tried next to upgrade the Tyan BIOS from v1.08 to the
>> latest 1.10. This helped somewhat because at least the board doesnt 
>> die
>> with black screen but it hangs forever on iPXE with initialising
>> devices...  It's still not possible to go in the iPXE control panel
>> either.
>> 
>> After I reflashed the motherboards BIOS btw I reflashed iPXE as well
>> because in the new one it was not in the BIOS initially.
>> 
>> 
>> So any suggestions what to do now?
>> 
>> Unfortunately I did NOT backup the original firmware from the card, 
>> you
>> should've include that in the tutorial as well :(
>> 
>> On broadcoms site when I try to search 5704 it's like 200 downloads 
>> and
>> none of them it.
>> 
>> Since I did not update the PXE code in NIC1 would it be possible to 
>> pull
>> out the PXE code from that and load it back to NIC0?
>> 
>> BTW the forum does not send confirmation emails so I had to post it
>> here.
> 
> 
> So, did you try the driver build of iPXE before flashing it?
> If the machine was "bricked" and you got no signal to monitor, how did
> you manage to flash bios?
> 
> I would suggest that you first of disable the nic roms, and the nics.
> Figure out which tools you can use to make backups, and then go from 
> there.
> 
> The only reasonable way that something like this could happen that I
> can think of is if you have some kind of RAM error issue in the
> machine. So make sure that is good (run memtest86+ or similar as a
> start)
Hello,

It is only "bricked" if I chose iPXE for booting but as I said the 
machine can now freeze during large file transfers through the nics. No 
it did not have any hardware or memory issues before that I throughly 
tested it.

Can that be an issue that I did not update the PXE code in adapter 1?

I would have no problem further experimenting with iPXE but I would like 
to get the system back in a working state again.

Could you describe it how to remove iPXE and restore the original rom 
(without having saved it)?

Thanks!