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NVME option ROM, a question for the ROM experts.

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First post, by Hoping

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I've been playing with an PCI-e to NVMe adapter that can be found cheap on eBay a other places and it works well on every motherboard I tried the oldest an 939 motherboard, but booting from the NVMe is the problem. No problem to install an OS.
I wonder if there will be the possibility of putting a option rom a PCI card so that it recognizes an NVMe SSD and the OS can be started from it. In this forum (https://www.win-raid.com/t3661f13-Experimenta … Option-ROM.html) they have an option ROM to insert into the motherboard bios. But it seems less dangerous to me, and also very interesting if it could be put on a PCI card. I know that there are ISA cards for option ROMs but I have not found any PCI other than this (http://www.softworld.es/cu/custodius_lite_2004/) that I don't know if it will be exactly what is necessary, and it could not be easily obtained I also suppose that you could use a network card but it does not seem to me such a clean method but PCI network card with a rom socket are fairly common.
I am wondering this because I am currently using the USB boot method described here (https://www.win-raid.com/t871f50-HowTo-Get-fu … -UEFI-BIOS.html) but for some strange reason, I don't feel totally comfortable with this method. I think that this would be interesting in the future and even today for not so old systems like the XT-IDE rom is for older systems.

Reply 1 of 3, by darry

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I'm not a ROM expert, but I did get my Dell R710 to boot off of an NVME drive by loading this https://winraid.level1techs.com/t/experimenta … on-rom/32528/24 into the EEPROM on a 3COM 3C905C network card.

I set the PCI device ID in the ROM image to that of the NIC, padded the ROM to 64KB using the truncate command and flashed the file using flashrom (all under Linux).

Note that I had to use the version of the option ROM that tries to boot from the first NVME device it finds, the first version in the thread (which expects one to set the PCI device ID to that of the NVME drive) did not work for me .

I also tried flashing the option ROM into an ASM1061 PC Express SATA controller, but that did not work (with either option ROM version), so I had to use a legacy PCI network card (I could not source an affordable PCI Express one with a flashable EEPROM, so I resorted to the old 3COM legacy PCI one through a PCI Express to PCI bridge which I had lying around).

This setup boots up fine into CentOS. I DDed an existing SATA SSD install (on which I rebuilt the initial RAM drive with NVME support) onto the NVME drive, removed the SATA drive and it booted right up from the NVME drive.

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Reply 2 of 3, by Hoping

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Thank you very much, so you have confirmed that this method is possible and it would avoid modifying the BIOS of the motherboard.
In my case, the motherboard does have PCI, Fujitsu D3128-b25. The difference would be if UEFI could be used, or it could only be in legacy mode. I'm still using the USB method because i prefer UEFI for Win10, Linux doesn't care about that, that's great.

Reply 3 of 3, by darry

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Hoping wrote on 2022-11-30, 17:08:

Thank you very much, so you have confirmed that this method is possible and it would avoid modifying the BIOS of the motherboard.
In my case, the motherboard does have PCI, Fujitsu D3128-b25. The difference would be if UEFI could be used, or it could only be in legacy mode. I'm still using the USB method because i prefer UEFI for Win10, Linux doesn't care about that, that's great.

The option ROM in that thread is legacy, not (U)EFI .

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