Invalid mac at post

rodenal

Anybody here have any experience with the error "Mac address are invalid at both cmos and flash"?

this has popped up on my spare machine which has an asrock N68c-s ucc. The psu has started to die a death on this machine so after removing some components I had to reset the cmos to get it to post. Now I get the above message.

I've had this previously on another machine and used ASrocks' own mac tool to fix it but i'm having no luck here. The tool won't even read the boards current mac let alone overwrite with the correct values. I'm running it from a bootable cd as there is no floppy drive.

It ultimately doesnt matter as the machine uses a pci wifi card and doesnt particularly need the lan to be working but it is annoying pressing F1 to get the machine to boot.

Have also emailed Asrock to see if they have a solution but suggestions are welcome.

A.Penny.Saved

I have had invalid MAC addresses on two PC's, my 2nd PC developed it but was easily fixed by using the Bios Flash program to re-program the MAC address.

My main PC developed the problem where the MAC address of the 2nd ethernet port became invalid.

Gigabyte support would not help They wouldn't supply a utility for me to re-program the MAC because they don't like such stuff in the hands of the public. It's become widespread now that manufacturers won't allow the changing of MAC addresses like they used to do.

They told me that I would have to send the board away to them for it to be repaired. It was still under warranty but not something I wanted to do for something so simple.

The MAC address fixed itself after my PC's Bios corrupted after which it restores from the backup Bios on Gigabyte boards. That re-programmed the MAC address and restored it to working.

The Bios corruption was happening fairly regularly, especially after windows crashes, until recently after a Bios update.

If your PSU is faulty I would get and replace it because unstable high voltages could harm the PC and might be what has caused this.

You probably won't find a command line utility to re-program the MAC on recent motherboards and windows programs that claim to do it don't work.

rodenal

Yeah new psu has been ordered, will probably take a couple of weeks though given the time of year.

I think you're correct r.e no command line utility, the most recent version of asrocks own utility that I can find certainly wont read/write the boards mac.

Tried flashing the bios to several older versions too, though i couldn't go back to the first release as that bios wont support my cpu, in any case each flash just seems to copy over the existing mac.

From reading up there may be a way to enter command strings at the time of flashing the bios to enable me to change the mac. This isn't something I particularly want to mess about with though given the potential for it to go wrong and render the board / bios a brick, will see if asrock come back to me with anything useful

A.Penny.Saved

rodenal wrote: »

From reading up there may be a way to enter command strings at the time of flashing the bios to enable me to change the mac. This isn't something I particularly want to mess about with though given the potential for it to go wrong and render the board / bios a brick, will see if asrock come back to me with anything useful

That's how I had to do it with an older nForce 2 motherboard but I don't think it is possible with newer motherboard flash programs.

Worth a shot though, try using /? or -h, -help or possibly ? at the end of the flash command without any Bios file specified to see if it will list the options available. Try it with double - too --.

rodenal

Quick update on this -

Asrock sent me over an updated utility which was able to read the current mac and overwrite with the correct value....only problem being the tool decided that the mac stickered on my board wasnt valid - I forced the tool to accept and write this mac and all appears to now be well again.

Happy days, however I havent tried to use the port yet!