HP N36L/N40L/N54L Microserver Updated AHCI BIOS Support.

RichTJ99

Hi,

I just wanted to follow up to find out of if this does work with the N40L?

Thanks,
Rich

demetris

Yes it does

mr-b

Hi

I just upgraded the BIOS to the TheBay's 19/10/2011 version (previously I was running the Russian hacked one) and thought I'd give changing from IDE to SATA another attempt. I changed the Onchip SATA config value "SATA PORTS 4/5 IDE  Mode" from Enabled to Disabled and rebooted, but the devices still appear as IDE mode.

With the Russian BIOS, you could change the "SATA IDE combined mode" from Enabled to Disabled and all the devices showed up as SATA.

What am I doing wrong?

mr-b

So is anyone using the latest BIOS (19/10/11) with SATA on the IDE ports?

RichTJ99

I am also about to give this a try on my setup.  I guess I will wait for your results MrB.

maxwell

I am using this on a N40 and have tried both versions of this BIOS I have stuck with the older version as that has a couple more options to play with.
It works fine but during the boot process it does indeed say (incorrectly) that the drives are IDE but further into the boot reports all channels as SATA, On my system it also incorrectly reports the size of my 3TB drives.
More importantly it does enable the ODD as full SATA and this is now my boot drive.
WHS 2011 has no problem with the BIOS and reports all drives correctly for both size and interface.

mr-b

Tx for the info.

So are you saying on the older (30/9) BIOS that the POST reports the "IDE" ports as IDE even though they are actually SATA? The Russian BIOS seems to list them correctly. Whereabouts later during boot does it report them as SATA? I'm on Win7 not WHS, but I can't find anywhere it reports the drives as SATA (Device Manager lists all the SATA & IDE drives as ATA).

Also I understood from the first post that the newer 29/10 BIOS simplified the options (but the functionality remained). Are you are saying that this isn't the case?

maxwell

Both versions of this BIOS report the drives as IDE initially, I stayed with the older version only because that was the last one I flashed. As for seeing the SATA channnels reported during boot I disabled the quick boot option in BIOS which then causes it to display more information and rebooted several times as you have to be quick to see it.
Yes Device manager does list all the drives as ATA because thats what they are (PATA or SATA) as opposed to SCSI or USB.
What you need to check is the UDMA mode as this is what really matters for transfer rates:
In Device Manager double click IDE ATA/ATAPI
All your drive channels will be shown as ATA Channel 0, 1 etc
Double click the first channel and select the advanced tab
you can now see the current UDMA Mode which should match the drive spec
What you really need to know is that the channel that was the ODD is running at full spec as this is the reason for using the BIOS mod in the first place.

RichTJ99

Hi,

I just flashed the bios.  It does say 'the bay' while booting so i guess it worked. I didnt see anything in the IDE section of the bios that looked like it enabled anything in the bios.  

Is this a flash & its set properly?

Thanks,
Rich

g725s

Does anyone know the complete history of HP BIOS for the N36L and the N40L?

Also what is the history of hacked BIOS for the HP ProLiant MicroServer?