Difference between revisions of "Xonar EEPROM Failure"

Revision as of 13:05, 19 June 2013

Xonar EEPROM Failure

Sometimes, Xonar PCI/PCI-E cards randomly fail to be recognized.

The driver refused to load or to install, and in Device Manager, the card is shown as an unknown sound card or as "C-Media Oxygen audio device". Putting the card into another slot or another computer does not help.

This happens when the EEPROM on the card gets overwritten.
(This EEPROM stores the PCI subsystem vendor and product IDs; when it gets overwritten, the main chip cannot read the subsystem IDs and uses a default ID (13F6:8788) which is not recognized by the Xonar driver.)

To reliably detect whether the EEPROM was overwritten, go into Device Manager, show the properties page of the device, go to the "Details" tab, and select the property "Hardware IDs", and look at the values after "SUBSYS_":

Causes

The exact cause is unknown.
It seems that the problem occurs only with certain computers or motherboards, and after booting from a CD (i.e., (re)installation of an operating system, or using a live CD).

Restoring the EEPROM

I have written a tool that can restore the original contents of the EEPROM.
It needs direct access to the hardware, therefore, it can not be run inside Windows.

In DOS

If you have a working DOS, you can use this method. (This tool is run in the same way as Asus' xee01.bat.)

1. Download restoree.exe;
2. boot DOS;
   (this works only with a real DOS such as MS-DOS or DR-DOS or FreeDOS; an emulated DOS such as the DOS box of Windows or the DOS in an emulated computer (e.g. VMWare) will not work)
3. run restoree.exe.

(source code: restoree.c)

Booting from a floppy

1. Download this floppy image: floppy.img (1.44 MB);
2. write it to a floppy with rawrite.exe (which you can get somewhere on the Internet);
3. boot from the floppy.

Booting from a CD

1. Download this ISO file: restore_eeprom.iso (1.8 MB);
2. burn it to a blank CD-R;
3. boot from the CD.

Booting from a USB memory stick/flash disk

1. Make a bootable USB flash disk (see this description), but do not put the xee01 files on the disk;
2. download restoree.exe and put in on the flash disk;
3. boot from the flash disk and run restoree.exe.

Booting Linux

The Linux Xonar driver has a simple version of the EEPROM restoring tool integrated since kernel 2.6.30 (which was released June 2009).
Just boot your installed Linux, or any recent Linux live CD.
However, this simple version is not able to correct all possible errors.

Feedback

clemens@ladisch.de

Warranty

none

Bug Reports

Many users have reported this problem:

http://vip.asus.com/forum/view.aspx?board_id=21&id=20080308014957187
http://vip.asus.com/forum/view.aspx?board_id=21&id=20080815123512921
http://vip.asus.com/forum/view.aspx?board_id=21&id=20081109201810093
http://vip.asus.com/forum/view.aspx?board_id=21&id=20090108020749752
http://vip.asus.com/forum/view.aspx?board_id=21&id=20090211084749940
http://vip.asus.com/forum/view.aspx?board_id=21&id=20090212184022002
http://vip.asus.com/forum/view.aspx?board_id=21&id=20090417024503409
http://vip.asus.com/forum/view.aspx?board_id=21&id=20090424193309127
http://vip.asus.com/forum/view.aspx?board_id=21&id=20090719054139406
http://vip.asus.com/forum/view.aspx?board_id=21&id=20100510174004218
http://vip.asus.com/forum/view.aspx?board_id=21&id=20100828085839182
http://vip.asus.com/forum/view.aspx?board_id=21&id=20110120170223383
http://vip.asus.com/forum/view.aspx?board_id=21&id=20110318045748367
http://vip.asus.com/forum/view.aspx?board_id=21&id=20120505102639207
http://vip.asus.com/forum/view.aspx?board_id=21&id=20130128083647397
http://vip.asus.com/forum/view.aspx?board_id=21&id=20130506122138947
http://bugzilla.novell.com/show_bug.cgi?id=462365
(and private e-mail)