[SOLVED] Problem Flashing with BOOTUTILW64E [FLB File]

[cottsay]

I just stumbled upon this thread while trying to flash my 82574L, and I thought I'd report my findings for anyone else that makes their way here.

Unfortunately, when I was trying to use the directions that jrsmile posted, BOOTUTILW64E.EXE just ended up hanging. In retrospect, this was probably because the new image was larger than the old one and I didn't bother to change the size in the .flb header. In any case, instead of investigating the .flb problems, I tried to troubleshoot why flashrom wasn't working correctly (I was getting the same error that jrsmile mentioned on Mint).

It turns out that if your kernel is configured with CONFIG_STRICT_DEVMEM=y, flashrom won't work. So I ended up re-compiling my kernel with it disabled, and flashrom lit up. I had to use a pretty recent build of flashrom to get support for the 82574L, by the way.

From there, I read the ROM contents (total of 512K) and looked around for PXE code using "cat backup.bin | xxd | less". I found that the PXE code started at offset 0x2000, so I dumped the contents of 808610d3.mrom at that point (which overwrote all of the original PXE code) using some "dd" shenanigans. After I wrote it back to the card with flashrom, everything lit up!

iPXE briefly shows up during BIOS initialization (where IBA used to initialize), and I have an iPXE entry in my BIOS boot menu, which works as expected.

Thanks to robinsmidsrod and jrsmile for sharing this conversation!