Comment 191 for bug 263555

I am still contacted about once per month for instructions on how to recover ethernet functionality on systems that have had their 1Gb flash content corrupted, possibly by this defect.

If you believe that you are affected by this isssue, you can safely perform steps 1 through 5 from the bullet list below, then contact me with the result, from which I will prepare a fully repaired image, and post it back to you. You can then continue with steps 6,7 & 8.

1) Download a CD image of the recovery program (originally created by Karsten Keil formerly of SuSE) from http://e1000.sourceforge.net/e1000e_recover.iso. Please type the address in your browser window and choose "save to fle"- you cannot search for this file.

2) Burn the iso to CD, & boot the CD. When prompted, select “Rescue System”
Linux will load, you’ll see an openSUSE splashscreen, and eventually a login prompt.

3) Log on as root. There's no password, so just hit return.

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

       e1000e_nvm -r –d eth0 -o ethtool.dmp

5) mount a USB disk to save the file, and send the file to me david_dot_graham_at_intel_dot_com

I will then fix up the image, and mail it back to you as ethtoola.dmp.
When you receive the updated file:

6) Write the new eeprom content back to your system NVM

            e1000e_nvm –d eth0 -P 108C8086 ethtoola.dmp

7) You will see some warnings, select YES when prompted.

8) You should then be able to remove the recovery CD, and successfully boot back to a working ethernet using Linux, Windows, OpenSolaris, or anything else.