Comment 364 for bug 263555

I have been dealing with a lot of these recovery requests, and have been using a tool developered by Karsten Keil. The tool reads the (probably) corrupted content, which is sent to me. I repair the image - usually a single-byte corruption, and then I return the corrected image to be written back to the NVM using the same tool.

Follows the instructions that I have been providing to the individual reports I have had....
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Go to:

      ftp://ftp.suse.com/pub/people/kkeil/testing/e1000e/

Copy & paste this link in to a browser window, and you should see a list of files, including one:

      e1000e_recover.iso

This is an ISO image of a CD, so save it to your local system, then burn it to a CD, and use it to boot your problem system. From finding the ISO to actually booting your system is quite a few steps - if you get stuck of course just let me know and I'll guide you through the detail, but for now I'll assume that you're still with me.

From the boot options presented by the CD, select "rescue system", as that's where we'll find the eeprom recovery tool.

When prompted for user, log on as root. There's no password, so just hit return.

1) Read the current eeprom and save it to file. Be patient !

      e1000_nvm -r -u -o ethtool.dmp

2) mount a USB disk to save the file, and send the file to me <email address hidden>

I will then fix up the image, and mail it back to you as ethtoola.dmp, and then, you can boot again to the CD, and

3) Write the new eeprom content back to your system NVM, using something like (may be different depending on the device id that is indictaed in the nvm, but I will provide any update to this step along with the fixed-up NVM image that I return)

      e1000_nvm -u -P 10498086 ethtoola.dmp

And select YES when prompted.

4) You should then be able to remove the recovery CD, and successfully boot back to a working ethernet.

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