PXE-E05 boot error message

[Bob Collins]

Okay, here it is, when I boot my T22, I get an error message, regarding PXE-E05 and the onboard NIC.

As it turns out, I can only find reference to the error for PXE devices, and it means the checksum or eeprom on the NIC are bad. Okay, no worries, I wander to IBM's site and find a diskette utility for updating/fixing the eeprom. It fails on each try with a Bad Checksum and ultimately does not update.

Two questions, has anyone had this and corrected it? And the references mentioned above indicate that an eeprom update was occuring when power was removed and thus left the eeprom failed, this did not happen as this is a notebook and has a good battery, what do you make of it?

Finally, there were no mods, updates to anything when this started to occur. I was booting the machine one morning and there it was.....

Thanks
Bob

[ZPrime]

well, eeproms can go bad. it's an unfortunate fact of life for modifyable memory.

you could try disabling the EEPROM/boot from lan function. I know the T42 has a separate bios entry for it - when you disable the eeprom, it also turns off wake-on-lan functionality as well as flash-over-lan. assuming you don't need WOL or LAN flashing, you should be able to just disable the eeprom and move on with your life.

you only need that eeprom if you do PXE booting...

[Bob Collins]

"you could try disabling the EEPROM/boot from lan function. I know the T42 has a separate bios entry for it - when you disable the eeprom, it also turns off wake-on-lan functionality as well as flash-over-lan. assuming you don't need WOL or LAN flashing, you should be able to just disable the eeprom and move on with your life. "

You know, that is what I thought but being a bear of very little brain, I was not able to find a BIOS setting to turn off the PXE boot portion.

Interesting to note also is that when looking in the BIOS, there is a blank for the mac address. Like it does not even know that it should have one. Assuming the eeprom should know about the mac address, I wonder if the whole card (mini pci) has gone bad and was the reason a week or so ago I lost connectivity with my XP install, which is not that big of a deal as I am on the OS/2 Warp 4 project with this T22.

Thanks for the input, at least it helps clarify my thoughts that it might in fact be kaput.
Bob

[TheNose]

Hi!

Was there are solution for this problem? I have exactly the same problem.

[Bob Collins]

I completely forgot about this question. I vaguely remember removing all the cards, batteries, removable drives, ram, hd, etc from the machine and cleaned everything with compressed air.

I reassembled the machine and was ready for a test when the wife let me know it was reading time with the son. So it waited for a day or two and when I booted up to do something with it, the message was gone.

I do think I may have looked through all the BIOS settings again and reset things to normal/basic/default settings. I recently installed FreeBSD 5 on it for a time and the networking was fine. I have since blown that away and put my XP Pro back on it, so my Sister in law can use this machine for a bit.

Sorry my explanation is so weak and there is no definitive answer. Hope it works out for you.....

[AbsoluteRaleigh]

I get an error message, regarding PXE-E05 and the onboard NIC.

It wasn't seeing the hard drive and attempted to boot from the network, since it couldn't, you got the error msg.