Solved!

On the ’Advanced’ page of the BIOS, there was a switch for the Onboard LAN Boot ROM, and by default it was set to disabled. I switched it on and can confirm that ATASX works on this board.

I now see the ATASX documentation does make a mention of this in passing, saying ”you have to activate the ability to boot from network card”. So this was a simple case of RTFM on my part. :)

I’d still be interested to know how if at all this’ll work with an SSD.

I’ve been thinking of getting an SSD with built-in encryption, such as the Kingston SSDNow V+ 100E Series. From what I gather, utilizing the encryption would require that the BIOS supports HDD passwords. This is what lead me to ATASX.

My current motherboard is an Asus M4A78-EM with the latest available AMIBIOS for it, revision 2101.

For all appearances, I’ve successfully configured the ATASX.ROM module for my setup, managed to embed it into the main BIOS ROM using mmtool, replacing the existing PCI ethernet module (10EC:8168) with it and flashed the resulting ROM file into my BIOS chip.

Yet, during the boot, there’s no indication that the extension is in fact there: the prompt for security setup doesn’t appear and, when listing the harddisks, POST doesn’t say anything about the security extension as it does in the example images.

Did I read the documentation wrong when I thought this method didn’t involve burning an EEPROM? Have I made some error in the process, or is it just that the AMIBIOS for this motherboard somehow isn’t compatible with ATASX?

And in the end, would even having support for ATA security enable me to utilize the built-in encryption on modern SSDs? I only came to think of this when I read in another thread there’s a user with an SSD for whom ATASX apparently doesn’t work (if I’m reading the Google translation right).