FRUSDR for S5500HC

[Lou Toot]

All,

I am trying to switch fan control on my Intel S5500HC mobo from a manual thermaltake box with knobs to something a bit more proc temp savvy and leveraging the PWM connectors on the boards. Got the fans for the job but now I realize that:

a. you can't really control fan speeds in Linux with pwmconfig/fancontrol
b. a utility called FRUSDR can be used with a bit of configuration to update the firmware directly
c. Intel *STOPPED* offering this utility for old boards like mine!


Taking a stab in the dark, I was wondering where a lingering copy of FRUSDR for my board can be found, or if I can use a copy of the program for another intel board family instead.

Any ideas?

Thanks!

 

[Lou Toot]

To answer my own question:

Apparently the good folks at /r/datahoarder made an archive and posted it to archive.org

Intel removing unknown amount of drivers and BIOS's on November 22nd : DataHoarder

downloadcenter.intel.com : Free Download, Borrow, and Streaming : Internet Archive


which was a great and noble service. Unfortunately it was archived in a single .tar file nearing 400GB, so selective downloads of the files I needed were impossible. After a 2-day torrent download, I was able to find the right build and board version of FRUSDR for my issue, however I think this board has broken my will to remedy, given that:

1. it apparently can't read USB sticks or drives at all with the onboard ports, therefore no EFI shell access with files on an easy-to-edit memory stick.
2. I can get it to read a dos-formatted sata drive after a bit of prep, but after running the FRUSDR util, it also vehemently complained about a missing front panel temp sensor - I assume that drives it to alert/failure mode and spins the fans at full speed as a warning.
3. Poking around in the .sdr file, I could change certain aspects of fan speeds, but I could not find any way to tell it to ignore the missing front panel temp sensor.
4. Finally, I wanted to see if there was some logged events in the BMI or something that would support the missing front panel sensor causing an alert-driven fanspeed, but I could not find a working version of the EFI viewer that is supposedly for this board in that archive. It might be there under some non-obvious name, but at this point this is becoming more trouble than just keeping the dumb voltage-driven analog controller attached and moving on, or using a hopefully more flexible external PWM controller.. what a mess!

 

[Whaaat]

1. Board definitely can read USB sticks, just everything in the bios should be enabled and stick has to be formatted correctly;
2. missing front panel is not an issue, during update FRUSDR asks you about what fans are connected and if you mark absent or slow spinning fan as connected it will max out all the rest of fans as preventive measure;
3. ignore this sensors and the board will ignore it as well;
4. Events can be viewed with Intel® System Event Log (SEL) Viewer Utility;
This board has rather simple PWM fan control, all you have to do is set correctly minimum RPM for each fan in .sdr config file and specify which fans are actually connected to the board during FRUSDR update dialog.