Flashing M1015 on AMD E-350 motherboard?

[DuronClocker]

So I decided last night to flash my M1015 to IT firmware before installing OpenIndiana.

I was able to clear the old firmware from it just fine, but I'm getting the unable to initialize PAL error message when trying to flash the new firmware now. I don't recall the exact file names now that I'm at home, but I made a DOS USB flash drive and tried the sas2flsh method. Also tried the SASFLASH tool from IBM, but it couldn't see the card at all.

From what I understand, this is a limitation of the motherboard. Unfortunately neither of my boards work (Intel DP67BG, MSI H61M-E33) regardless of what PCI-e slot I put it in.

The *only* system I'm interested in building any time soon would be an AMD E-350 to build a second HTPC for our bedroom. I read one person say they had trouble on a particular AMD E-350 board, but I figured I'd ask to see if anyone has had any success flashing an M1015 on any of them.

 

[s0rce]

I wasn't able to flash a Br10i on an ASRock e-350 board. I had to take to work and flash it on a computer there. Can't remember the specs. I think it might have been a dual xeon machine.

 

[idea]

Does it have UEFI? When using this utility in DOS on my X9SCM motherboard gave me "failed to initalize PAL", I booted to UEFI and used the sas2flash.efi that LSI provides. It worked, no problems. Still had to boot to DOS first to use megarec though.

 

[DuronClocker]

Both have UEFI BIOS and both have options in boot order to boot UEFI first, but it doesn't seem to do anything.. not sure what it is supposed to.

I had an old Intel server board a couple years back that had an EFI shell, so I know what that does at least.

 

[TypeRazor]

If you cant get it to flash on any of your boards I would be more then happy to cross-ship you one of mine with an updated firmware, just pay shipping

 

[idea]

Both have UEFI BIOS and both have options in boot order to boot UEFI first, but it doesn't seem to do anything.. not sure what it is supposed to.

I had an old Intel server board a couple years back that had an EFI shell, so I know what that does at least.

"Not sure what its supposed to do" -- Well, there is a clue

I'll tell you how I did it on my X9SCM. In your OS you format a USB disk to FAT32 and put sas2flash.efi and your firmware files on there. Then, you boot to your EFI shell. At the EFI shell prompt you switch to this disk by typing at the prompt: "fs0:" It might be "fs1:" or "fs2:" and so on, depending on which disk number it is. Then you basically use DOS commands like "dir" and "cd" to navigate to sas2flash.efi.

LSI does not provide an EFI version of "megarec" to my knowledge so you will have to boot to DOS to clear your flash prior to all that. It's a two step process.

 

[DuronClocker]

I wasn't able to flash a Br10i on an ASRock e-350 board. I had to take to work and flash it on a computer there. Can't remember the specs. I think it might have been a dual xeon machine.

You might be the one I remember reading about then. So ASRock's E-350 is definitely out. I wonder if any of them would work.

If you cant get it to flash on any of your boards I would be more then happy to cross-ship you one of mine with an updated firmware, just pay shipping

Talk about taking care of buyers I bought the one a while back that had a plastic pushpin missing. I ended up putting some Arctic Silver on and replacing both of them with plastic chipset pushpins off a motherboard chipset. Not sure I'd feel that's "even" trading that one out to you

"Not sure what its supposed to do" -- Well, there is a clue

I'll tell you how I did it on my X9SCM. In your OS you format a USB disk to FAT32 and put sas2flash.efi and your firmware files on there. Then, you boot to your EFI shell. At the EFI shell prompt you switch to this disk by typing at the prompt: "fs0:" It might be "fs1:" or "fs2:" and so on, depending on which disk number it is. Then you basically use DOS commands like "dir" and "cd" to navigate to sas2flash.efi.

LSI does not provide an EFI version of "megarec" to my knowledge so you will have to boot to DOS to clear your flash prior to all that. It's a two step process.

I know what an EFI shell is. As I said I had a couple Intel Xeon server boards a couple years ago (SE7500WV2 and SE7320VP2) that had it. My two current desktop boards have UEFI boot options, but they don't seem to do anything at all. No shell ever appears. From what I gather an EFI shell and UEFI booting are two completely different things. UEFI looks to be a way that the motherboard communicates with the OS. I had assumed that UEFI was like an updated EFI shell of some sort.

This is a minor annoyance, but I'm not in a huge rush. I could make do with the onboard ports for now. I figured if I were able to remove the firmware, installing it should be no problem.. apparently not I don't mind using this as a reason to move forward with gathering parts for a small HTPC, but that might not work out for this either.