I've updated your K8NUltra-9 bios with the nvraid 4.84 bios, if you just want to download and flash it -
http://www.vapulus.com/K8NU-9.F6e.zip . Also i've written up how it's done, as you wanted to know.
Ok here's a howto on replacing the nvraid bios within the main motherboard bios. Posted here so it's shows up in google eventually, should anyone else need to do this. Award bioses are modular, meaning they're made up of seperate modules, eg, the mainboard bios, the graphic logos (epa etc), and several small bioses for the onboard components like soundcard, network, and raid controllers.
to view and edit the modules within an award bios, you can use a program called cbrom, which operates on the bios rom's downloadable at your motherboard makers website. Cbrom can be downloaded at
www.biosmods.com which also contains some sparse details on how to use it.
cbrom207 -
http://www.biosmods.com/download/award/cbrom207.zip
We'll look at using cbrom to replace the nvraid bios component of the F6 gigabyte K8N-Ultra-9 bios with an updated version.
First we need a copy of a more recent nvraid bios to insert into the F6 bios, which if you try to google for, is a hard thing to find. The best method is to find a bios for a different motherboard that uses the same chipset, and is updated and maintained much better than the gigabyte bios. A bit of googling reveals the asus a8n-e nforce4 ultra board has the nvraid 4.84 bios included in it's version 1006 bios, so let's download that:
http://dlsvr02.asus.com/pub/ASUS/mb/soc ... NE1006.zip
also we need to download the F6 bios for the gigabyte k8n-ultra-9.
extract all three zip files to c:\cbrom207 then delete everything except cbrom.exe, K8NU-9.F6 and A8NE1006.BIN. You don't need to do that, but it saves on clutter in the directory.
get the command prompt up from start - all program - accessories.
First let's look at the gigabyte bios.
this is telling cbrom to operate on the F6 bios file with the /d flag, to display it's contents, and send (>) the output to a file called gig.txt, as the output is larger than the command prompt window can display.
Open gig.txt, we'll see the nvraid bios comes under pci device drivers, as pci driver A, module 8. on the list.
To be honest, i haven't had time to look into whether the order of the modules within the bios are important. It's possible the bios calls modules based on name, but it may also call modules based on their byte offset within the rom. So although it
might be unneccesary, i always replace modules in the same position as they were removed, which adds a few more steps. Anyone willing to test position changes effects on their bios, let us know how it goes, personally i like to keep things as they were rather than risk a bad bios flash. To replace the nvraid bios and keep it at position 8, we need to remove all following modules in the bios in order to add them after the new nvraid bios module later. We could 'extract' (this flag extracts a module to disk) the nvraid bios first then 'release' it (the release flag removes a module from the bios), then add our new one. However this would move module 9 to module 8, 10 to 9, etc, and our nvraid bios would become module 14.
So, let's look at gig.txt, position 8 onward:
8. PCI driver[A] 0C000h(48.00K)064B4h(25.18K)NVRAID.ROM
9. PCI driver 10000h(64.00K)07AFFh(30.75K)NVPXE.NIC
10. PCI driver[C] 0F000h(60.00K)07264h(28.60K)5139.BIN
11. PCI driver[D] 0DE00h(55.50K)08768h(33.85K)yukpxe.lom
12. LOGO1 ROM 00B64h(2.85K)00520h(1.28K)DBIOS.BMP
13. OEM4 CODE 06DC6h(27.44K)03264h(12.60K)FINER.BIN
14. OEM0 CODE 02549h(9.32K)01B13h(6.77K)dbf.bin
The order things are extracted doesn't matter. But we need a copy of each on the disk. I'm going to extract each module and release it (delete it from the bios) in the module order. For the pci modules, you'll be given a choice A to D which module you want. Press enter after each line.
Code: Select all
cbrom.exe K8NU-9.F6 /PCI extract
A
cbrom.exe K8NU-9.F6 /PCI extract
B
cbrom.exe K8NU-9.F6 /PCI extract
C
cbrom.exe K8NU-9.F6 /PCI extract
D
cbrom.exe K8NU-9.F6 /LOGO1 extract
cbrom.exe K8NU-9.F6 /OEM4 extract
cbrom.exe K8NU-9.F6 /OEM0 extract
cbrom.exe K8NU-9.F6 /PCI release
A
cbrom.exe K8NU-9.F6 /PCI release
B
cbrom.exe K8NU-9.F6 /PCI release
C
cbrom.exe K8NU-9.F6 /PCI release
cbrom.exe K8NU-9.F6 /LOGO1 release
cbrom.exe K8NU-9.F6 /OEM4 release
cbrom.exe K8NU-9.F6 /OEM0 release
rename NVRAID.ROM NVRAID.ROM.4.81
That last line renames nvraid.rom to show it is the 4.81 version. Next we need to get the nvraid 4.84 module out of the asus bios.
Code: Select all
cbrom.exe A8NE1006.BIN /d > asus.txt
Open up asus.txt, we can see the nvraid bios is module 13, pci driver A.
13. PCI driver[A] 0C000h(48.00K)064EDh(25.23K)NVRAID.ROM
Let's extract it.
Code: Select all
cbrom.exe A8NE1006.BIN /PCI extract
A
Now the file NVRAID.ROM in our cbrom207 directory is the 4.84 version. All we need to do is put it in the K8NU-9.F6 bios and replace the modules that come after it. Refer to the gig.txt output we generated from the original K8NU-9.F6 for the module order and type. Notice when we extracted YUKPXE.LOM (pci driver D) it's name became uppercase, we'll correct that back to the original lowercase before reinserting it. Same for DBF.BIN.
Code: Select all
cbrom.exe K8NU-9.F6 /PCI NVRAID.ROM
cbrom.exe K8NU-9.F6 /PCI NVPXE.NIC
cbrom.exe K8NU-9.F6 /PCI 5139.BIN
rename YUKPXE.LOM yukpxe.lom
cbrom.exe K8NU-9.F6 /PCI yukpxe.lom
cbrom.exe K8NU-9.F6 /LOGO1 DBIOS.BMP
cbrom.exe K8NU-9.F6 /OEM4 FINER.BIN
rename DBF.BIN dbf.bin
cbrom.exe K8NU-9.F6 /OEM0 dbf.bin
cbrom.exe K8NU-9.F6 /d > gig2.txt
rename K8NU-9.F6 K8NU-9.F6e
All done, check gig2.txt is in the same order and filenames as gig.txt. The bios is renamed to .F6e indicate it is the edited version (we don't want to lose it and do all that again
). Put it on a floppy and flash from dos, or use the gigabyte window bios update app. Reboot, check the nvraid bios version that is displayed after the bios post screen.