Disable Option ROM on Gigabyte board?

[EnderW]

I have a Gigabyte C246-WU4. This is a C246 board which for those that don’t know is the Xeon/Workstation equivalent of a Z390.

After I installed my X550T2 NIC, I get the Intel Boot Agent every time I restart, which is very annoying. I think this is like a bootable BIOS on the network card or something.

On my previous Supermicro board, the BIOS had a setting for each individual PCI-E slot which allowed me to disable the Option ROM for the slot the NIC was installed and no more Boot Agent. This board does not. I’ve turned off or toggled every BIOS setting I can find. The only thing that disabled the Boot Agent is disabling “CSM support” but then I can’t even boot from my NVME SSD. “Storage Boot Option Control” sounds like it should work but has no effect regardless of the setting (Do Not Launch, UEFI, Legacy).

Does anyone have any experience with this problem on Gigabyte boards?

 

[Luke M]

If your BIOS doesn't have an option to ignore the boot ROM, then use the card's tools to disable it.

 

[EnderW]

If your BIOS doesn't have an option to ignore the boot ROM, then use the card's tools to disable it.

This is what I ended up doing. Took a few hours to figure out. I’ll post details this weekend.

 

[Deleted member 214115]

https://downloadcenter.intel.com/do...-Preboot-Images-and-EFI-Drivers?product=36773

This link contains the most recent BootUtil and BootIMG. BootUtil will allow you to interface the NIC's firmware, and enable or disable feature sets. BootIMG contains the most recent firmware, and can be flashed to not have PXE, iSCSI and such.

It used to be easier when using the PROSet interface via Device Manager to disable boot manager and even flash the firmware with Windows. But now you have to extract take ownership of the files and flash via CMD. It is easy to read and do, and also has a help command if you need extra guidance.