3C90x - SuperMicro P5MMS motherboard - AMI BIOS - NIC is not detected

Problem:
Intermittently, the 3Com NIC will not be detected, either during a cold or a warm boot.

Symptoms:
When the BIOS banner appears it will list PCI devices installed in the system.
When the 3C90x NIC initializes properly it will appears as ETHERNET in the banner.
When the 3C90x NIC does not initialize properly it will appear as NETWORK CONTROLLER.
When this happens, the diagnostics will report "No 3Com NIC is installed in this machine" and the device
drivers will fail to initialize.

Solution:
After testing several versions of the AMI BIOS for this system, 3Com has observed that some versions
exhibit this problem while some versions do not. Four versions of the BIOS were tested with the following results:

Rev. 1.9 - Failed 10 out of 50 boots
Rev. 1.08 - Failed 5 out of 35 boots
Rev. 1.7 - Failed 0 out of 50 boots
Rev. 1.05 - Failed 0 out of 50 boots

BIOS version 1.7 and 1.05 can be download from SuperMicro's FTP site FTP.SUPERMICRO.COM.
These versions are in the OLDBIOS directory of their website and the file names are:

MMS5271.ROM --> Rev. 1.7
MMS4111.ZIP --> Rev. 1.05

Presently, v1.7 is the most recent version that works consistently and is recommended by 3Com until a newer
BIOS is released by SuperMicro.