I have a proprietary server using a customized bios on a Tyan S5515 motherboard and the motherboard went bad on me. Fortunately the BIOs was still good on a removable WINBOND 25Q64FVSIG. I bought the retail version of the S5515 and put in this original WINBOND chip and the original bios took to the board fine and booted just fine; however, when I went to reload the original server system software, a customized version of Windows 7 with special server software embedded in that installation kit, it somehow recognized the retail motherboard as not original and does not load properly due to this pointless security catch. Im almost positive that the software has some sort of security feature that looks at the hardware embedded NIC port MAC addresses and compares them to the embedded factory NIC pot addresses hidden in the BIOS. Its really the only think I can think of identity-wise that is unique from motherboard to motherboard of the same model type. I popped the bios off and read the data on my Elnec SeeProg and looked at the BIN data, searched the bios for the original MAC addresses of both embedded NIC ports of the original board, found the 1st bugger (00E81EAD94C) but no trace of the second one, so assuming the second must follow a +1 process since it is sequential ending in 4D, I changed the original MAC address in the original bios to match the new MAC address on the new motherboard (00E081E05574, and assuming the other sequentially ending in 75 will just take fine). This original MAC address was in the binary code of the bios only once and in order, not backwards, so since it only came up once, I assumed that was it and no other changes needed to be made. I edited and saved the changed lower MAC address and put the chip back in the server and now the server comes up with an error at boot stating that there is something wrong with that 1st NIC socket but keeps booting then in Windows 7 I can get the sockets working and they seem to be picking up the proper MAC addresses now but I had to run Win7 repair services to get them working, plus the proprietary server software still will not setup properly. I think I missed something in this MAC address swap. Can someone help me with this issue? I really need to get this server functioning again and I am in the hot seat on getting this resolved. Recording and loading new bios bin files on this board is easy by the way because the chip is in a socket. Thanks in advance for any help you guys might be able to offer - Rob
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