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

[Christian Nilsson]

On Thu, 30 Jan 2020 at 20:39, <freebsd at tango.lu> wrote:
>
>
> 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!

So You tried to:
> > I would suggest that you first of disable the nic roms, and the nics.
And when the NIC rom is disabled, you still have issues? If so, you
should really start to consider what the cause can be, and iPXE is
unlikely one of them.