As mentioned in the previous post, I recently acquired an R710 as part of a homelab buildout. I’ve now spent the best part of a day trying to figure out why the Lifecycle Controller stopped working, after it updated the BIOS. I don’t particularily need it, but I know if I ignore it something will come back to bite me when I least expect it.
The one clue (after trying multiple Repair images) was that when the BIOS was booting it had a blank rev. e.g. under the Dell logo there was “BIOS Rev. ” and a blank space. Much google-fu later and it turns out that this generally happens if you try and jump too many BIOS revisions at once.
Since the upgrade was done by the Lifecycle Controller, and was from 6.0.4 -> 6.4.0 I didn’t expect this to be an issue, but there you go. The process to recover is actually fairly straightforward when you know how, and in fairness to Dell they have a huge amount of great information in their forums.
This is just the short and quick version of how to fix.
- Create a DOS USB disk using the instructions here: https://www.dell.com/support/article/ie/en/iebsdt1/SLN143196/how-to-create-a-bootable-usb-flash-drive-using-dell-diagnostic-deployment-package–dddp-?lang=EN
- Download as many revisions of the BIOS between the original release and the target and copy them to the USB drive too from here – you want the non-packaged version.
14/03/2017 22:24 1,631,701 R710-060007C.exe 14/03/2017 22:23 1,633,695 R710-060100C.exe 14/03/2017 22:23 1,650,371 R710-060203C.exe 14/03/2017 22:24 1,650,583 R710-060300C.exe 14/03/2017 22:22 1,653,153 R710-060400C.exe
NOTE: You might want to rename them to fit in DOS’ 8.3 filename limitation unless you like to try and guess what the ~ are hiding
- Reboot the server and hit F2 to access the boot options, then choose to boot from the USB stick
- When it has loaded, start with the older of the BIOS versions – in my case 6.0.7. If you get a warning about the platform not being recognised add the /forcetype flag after the executable name
- Repeat until you are on the BIOS version you were aiming for
At this point the Lifecycle Controller should come up and you can use it for the remainder of your platform/firmware updates
