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BIOS settings invalid on shutdown from GUI


freddiep

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I went through the threads on how to setup WOL recently, and was interested in having the XPEnology box use the scheduled power settings. This way I can have it off on a specific time period, but then activate manually from my router if I ever need to boot it during then. What i discovered is that the shutdown inside the GUI (or schedule) has a tendency to clear the BIOS info and reset the date. Tried it on my GA-MA785GM-US2H running the 4.2 (3211) build. If I power the box off suddenly, no issues. I issue a shutdown and the box picks up a 2009 date or worse it gets an invalid profile and clears out all the information (mandating me reconfiguring boot device order, RAID info, reset the time). Thought it was a bad battery so I replaced that, but it is definitely something this software is doing on a software requested shutdown. I saw a few threads around on other sites confirming this as well. Is there any hack in place to correct this?..or has anyone else noticed it?

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It did happened to me once. Since then, absolutely no issues! Oh wait! No reboot since then! :smile:)

This is not a real issue for me. It causes no other issues. The single problem i see is that the startup is a bit longer, but that's all.

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The biggest issue is that it invalidates any work on WOL. I saw a bunch of people working on it, but if at the end of the day you cannot do a power down without it writing something to BIOS config..and causing a critical error, then it really means WOL is not supported. if there is a particular motherboard/bios combo that doesn't have this issue, I'd like to know it and see if its feasible to change.

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Hi there, I am having this same issue with my HP N54L microserver. I have been running DSM 4.2 build 3202 for around a month with the included 250gb HD in SATA port 0. Recently I upgraded the bios to the hacked one to enable SATA port 4 and port 5 AHCI (which i need to enable in the BIOS menu), and put my HD on SATA port 5. Since then, I have discovered that DSM will write to the BIOS and lose all settings, reverting back to the default settings which disables AHCI on port 4 and 5 and therefore my server does not boot! I am not knowledgeable enough to know how to fix this, can anyone advise on a solution?

 

At the moment I have put the official HP bios back on the machine, and put my hard drive back into port 0 and everything works fine, but I would like to make use of the extra SATA port in the future.

 

Thanks

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@freddiep Have you tried fixing WOL by following the replies from viewtopic.php?f=2&t=665 ?

 

Yes. That works brilliantly to get the MAC correctly programmed. I can get the server to start with a WOL packet from my server. The issue is the shutdown or startup (not sure when the BIOS is being written..from my tests I believe it's only happening as it closes the server down soft). So I can issue the shutdown from the GUI, watch it turn off, then send the WOL packet to start it up. What I notice is that the date then is reset to 2009 in the system and NTP fails to work anymore (messing with it sometimes locks the server up). SSH in to the server shows me the incorrect system date. So sometimes a bootup with wrong date, sometimes an invalid BIOS profile, and sometimes a wiped BIOS... Mostly the latter two. hwclock doesn't link to the device, so I'm not sure where it's doing the write to BIOS configuration. I was curious if anyone had noticed it, and maybe..just maybe modded the system to not mess with it. I have to admit I only noticed this when I configured WOL, so I am not sure if that did not cause this. I have noticed a lot of posts on the topic about shutdown causing BIOS reset, but again..can't tell if they were doing WOL hacks first or not.

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I have the same problem, the issue is that DSM, as it is a strictly closed-line product of Synology, expects the BIOS to be in a specific format it can edit (and not the AMI BIOS HP uses in my case, my hackology server that is made of a HP M8000n, Asus motherboard, etc.). Now, this invalidates the CMOS, wipes all the changes (I for one need them, as I boot from USB, and primary boot device on this board is a Floppy device set even though there isn't on connected, and fails to go through all the devices to find the USB drive), and you're left with an unusable CMOS config that gets reset every time you restart.

Unfortunately this service runs real-time, so no matter what you do, power-off via pulling the plug, shutdown via terminal or GUI, the CMOS gets written and thus invalidated.

 

Now, so far I found only two solutions to counter this:

1. If you have a CMOS read-only pin, put a jumper on that madafaka. This should protect it from Synology's stupid CMOS-overriding daemon.

2. If you are good with it, try to modify your BIOS, hack around some default values, and set it up for your taste. I only recommend this to those who know EXACTLY what they are doing!

 

Another solution would be that someone finds the service that modifies the BIOS, and eliminates it. But I fear that this service might be embedded into many others and would possibly be bad to disable all of them.

Edited by Guest
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@freddiep Have you tried fixing WOL by following the replies from viewtopic.php?f=2&t=665 ?

 

Yes. That works brilliantly to get the MAC correctly programmed. I can get the server to start with a WOL packet from my server. The issue is the shutdown or startup (not sure when the BIOS is being written..from my tests I believe it's only happening as it closes the server down soft). So I can issue the shutdown from the GUI, watch it turn off, then send the WOL packet to start it up. What I notice is that the date then is reset to 2009 in the system and NTP fails to work anymore (messing with it sometimes locks the server up). SSH in to the server shows me the incorrect system date. So sometimes a bootup with wrong date, sometimes an invalid BIOS profile, and sometimes a wiped BIOS... Mostly the latter two. hwclock doesn't link to the device, so I'm not sure where it's doing the write to BIOS configuration. I was curious if anyone had noticed it, and maybe..just maybe modded the system to not mess with it. I have to admit I only noticed this when I configured WOL, so I am not sure if that did not cause this. I have noticed a lot of posts on the topic about shutdown causing BIOS reset, but again..can't tell if they were doing WOL hacks first or not.

 

My BIOS is also reset but fortunately for me, I have no issues with the whole system. Probably because of my Gigabyte MB and its dual BIOS?

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I have the same problem, the issue is that DSM, as it is a strictly closed-line product of Synology, expects the BIOS to be in a specific format it can edit (and not the AMI BIOS HP uses in my case, both on my fresh N54L and my hackology server that consists of the stuff in my signature). Now, this invalidates the CMOS, wipes all the changes (I for one need them, as I boot from USB, and primary boot device on this board is a Floppy device set even though there isn't on connected, and fails to go through all the devices to find the USB drive), and you're left with an unusable CMOS config that gets reset every time you restart.

Unfortunately this service runs real-time, so no matter what you do, power-off via pulling the plug, shutdown via terminal or GUI, the CMOS gets written and thus invalidated.

 

Now, so far I found only two solutions to counter this:

1. If you have a CMOS read-only pin, put a jumper on that madafaka. This should protect it from Synology's stupid CMOS-overriding daemon.

2. If you are good with it, try to modify your BIOS, hack around some default values, and set it up for your taste. I only recommend this to those who know EXACTLY what they are doing!

 

Another solution would be that someone finds the service that modifies the BIOS, and eliminates it. But I fear that this service might be embedded into many others and would possibly be bad to disable all of them.

 

Thanks for clarifying this topic fonix

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@freddiep Have you tried fixing WOL by following the replies from viewtopic.php?f=2&t=665 ?

 

Yes. That works brilliantly to get the MAC correctly programmed. I can get the server to start with a WOL packet from my server. The issue is the shutdown or startup (not sure when the BIOS is being written..from my tests I believe it's only happening as it closes the server down soft). So I can issue the shutdown from the GUI, watch it turn off, then send the WOL packet to start it up. What I notice is that the date then is reset to 2009 in the system and NTP fails to work anymore (messing with it sometimes locks the server up). SSH in to the server shows me the incorrect system date. So sometimes a bootup with wrong date, sometimes an invalid BIOS profile, and sometimes a wiped BIOS... Mostly the latter two. hwclock doesn't link to the device, so I'm not sure where it's doing the write to BIOS configuration. I was curious if anyone had noticed it, and maybe..just maybe modded the system to not mess with it. I have to admit I only noticed this when I configured WOL, so I am not sure if that did not cause this. I have noticed a lot of posts on the topic about shutdown causing BIOS reset, but again..can't tell if they were doing WOL hacks first or not.

 

My BIOS is also reset but fortunately for me, I have no issues with the whole system. Probably because of my Gigabyte MB and its dual BIOS?

 

Most Gigabyte will do that, but just wait and it will recover from previous settings if you leave it and do not press buttons on re-boot!

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Just registered to add that I'm seeing this bug too with my microserver. I don't think it is related to shutting down as it happens on mine when I physically power it off too. I've tried the original hacked BIOS, and TheBay's simplified one. Both lose the IDE/SATA settings once DSM has been run. I suppose I could try disabling all of my power on/off scheduling to see if that's related - worrying if it is as it would be blind luck that the BIOS address being written to doesn't have more catastrophic effects.

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Just registered to add that I'm seeing this bug too with my microserver. I don't think it is related to shutting down as it happens on mine when I physically power it off too. I've tried the original hacked BIOS, and TheBay's simplified one. Both lose the IDE/SATA settings once DSM has been run. I suppose I could try disabling all of my power on/off scheduling to see if that's related - worrying if it is as it would be blind luck that the BIOS address being written to doesn't have more catastrophic effects.

 

I should also add that I too have enabled scheduled power on and power off. I also did a test install of a clean build of DSM on a spare HDD and never had any BIOS problems, until I enabled the power on / off scheduling.

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My BIOS is also reset but fortunately for me, I have no issues with the whole system. Probably because of my Gigabyte MB and its dual BIOS?

Most Gigabyte will do that, but just wait and it will recover from previous settings if you leave it and do not press buttons on re-boot!

 

I'm new around here, but I read over at TweakTown Gigabyte forum that you can solve Gigabyte bios resets by hitting ALT-F12 at powerup to flash the backup bios the same as the main bios, so if it resets, it won't wipe your bios settings. In the video below, start at the :50 second mark:

http://forums.tweaktown.com/gigabyte/47 ... post416650

It certainly works on my Sandybridge hackintosh. I'd be curious if it could solve Freddiep's GA-MA785GM-US2H resets.

Sorry if this isn't relevant; I'm so new I don't even have XPE yet!

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Thanks for the info.

This is what we said. With Gigabyte's dual bios there are no issues. All Gigabyte MBs come with the 2nd bios duplicate as the 1st one.

Oh sorry, I meant that this procedure might work if the GB dual bios is still resetting, like the OP's GA-MA785GM-US2H. Sometimes the GB dual bios doesn't reflash the main bios correctly. Just a thought.

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I'm curious about how dual bios helps.. The execution bios sw is protected, but the configuration is not. The bios configuration is getting overwritten, and depending on what's written is invalidating the profile. I would think that it depends on the default configs as to whether things boot properly (defaults that work vs. configurations that need to be explicitly defined to boot properly).

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I'm curious about how dual bios helps.. The execution bios sw is protected, but the configuration is not. The bios configuration is getting overwritten, and depending on what's written is invalidating the profile. I would think that it depends on the default configs as to whether things boot properly (defaults that work vs. configurations that need to be explicitly defined to boot properly).

 

Well, as old said, you press a key combination in the BIOS to copy the current settings to the backup BIOS. This is then what is copied back in the case of a corrupt primary BIOS. I'm only going by what was posted here as I've not had a Gigabyte board for donkey's years and even when I did I didn't need to use the backup BIOS.

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