Our proprietary motherboards have two i210-AT NIC's. Our vendor currently supplies the boards with both NIC NVRAM's loaded with firmware version 3.16.
We are trying to update the NIC's to firmware version 3.25 in our production process using Windows PE, but have encountered a strange intermittent problem.
The EEUPDATE command ("EEUPDATEW64e.exe /All /D I210_Ver.3.25_20171012.bin") appears to be successful, per this output:
EEUPDATE v5.30.22.00
Copyright (C) 1995 - 2017 Intel Corporation
Intel (R) Confidential and not for general distribution.
NIC Bus Dev Fun Vendor-Device Branding string
=== === === === ============= =================================================
1 1 00 00 8086-1533 Intel(R) I210 Gigabit Network Connection
2 2 00 00 8086-1533 Intel(R) I210 Gigabit Network Connection
1: EEPROM Image Version: 3.25
2: EEPROM Image Version: 3.25
After cycling power to the board, we can confirm the NIC firmware version displayed in our BIOS settings. Usually, we will see 3.25 for both NIC's, as expected.
However on some units, the 2nd NIC will still report version 3.16 in the BIOS settings. (As I understand, the BIOS code is reading the firmware version via an offset to PCI BAR1 address.) In this case, the EEUPDATE tool does report firmware version 3.25 is installed. It is not clear which is correct, EEUPDATE or the BIOS.
We can usually repair this problem when it happens by simply rerunning the same EEUPDATE command as above. But this should not be necessary.
Any idea how we are getting this contradictory result, and what to do about it?
