3c90x cards generally

• Run 3c90xcfg.exe and enable the boot PROM
  • it can be downloaded as part of disk 2 of the EtherCD
• flash tools

  [DOS]	util430.exe	this ONLY works for putting official 3Com ROMs on though, it won't work for gPXE ROMs
  [DOS]	uniflash	only works if you have a motherboard that the NIC ROM will fit into
  [Linux]	bromutil/cromutil	'bromutil' is used for 3c90xB cards, while 'cromutil' is used for 3c90xC cards

• yes, it DOES have an integrated ROM! (it's the chip marked "AT49BV512", which holds 64kB)
  • (though this means you should be careful when flashing it — you can't do the hot swap trick if you screw it up, since it's soldered on)
• crazy-specific information of the manufacturing variations

1. before starting, set up these files:
   • either make a USB boot stick bootable into DOS, and download these files to it:
     • 3c90xcfg.exe — inside disk 2 of the EtherCD
     • mbaflash.exe — inside the MBA Utility Disk
   • or:
     • download this floppy and add a memdisk entry to your GRUB/SYSLINUX bootloader
     • download this tarball to your Linux distro
2. boot into DOS, run 3c90xcfg.exe, and change the Boot PROM line to 'enabled' if it isn't already
3. run mbaflash.exe
   (If you had MBA ≤v4.00, then you have to upgrade it past v4.00 before you can flash on a gPXE ROM. Even if you have the latest MBA version though, there are suggestions that you still have to run mbaflash.exe to be able to flash gPXE. It does some apparently-dummy operation that's actually needed??)
4. download the gPXE ROM from ROM-o-matic.net
   All of the 3C905C-TX-M's I've run across had a PCI vendor/device ID of 10B7:9200, but I don't know if they're all that way. If you want to double-check your card, run `lspci -n` in Linux or pcisniffer in DOS.
5. finally, boot into Linux and use cromutil to burn the gPXE ROM on:
   • lspci -v | grep -A 10 3c905C
     get the address of the card — it's the "I/O ports at e400" line
   • cromutil E400 id
     cromutil E400 read | strings -n 8 | less
     (optional) Make sure we got the right address. The 'read' command is considered a success if it spits out strings that suggest it's a 3COM or gPXE ROM.

     For some reason, the 'id' command spits out manufacturerID=1f, deviceID=03 when every other tool (ie. `lspci -n`) spits out 10B7:9200.

   • cromutil E400 erase
     cromutil E400 prog < gpxe-git-10b79200.rom
     Write the ROM to the card