[CentOS] flashing a BIOS on an HP server

Tue Apr 30 18:44:54 UTC 2013
m.roth at 5-cent.us <m.roth at 5-cent.us>

Hi, folks,

   Since I've gotten a total of one response in days on the HP forum,
maybe the collective mind here has an answer.... As I've mentioned in
other posts, we have an HP dl580 g5 that started throwing ECC errors.
But wait, it's worse: memory is mirrored.... And the thing is fully
populated with 32 DIMMs.


   I took my best guess, pulled the matching set of DIMMs, and took two
off of one of the four riser boards to replace them. I find that the
m/b *must* be fully populated before adding riser boards... *and* the
riser boards are mirrored. So I had to pull two riser boards, the one
I'd taken two DIMMs off of, and it's mirror.

   Brought it back up, no errors. Then, Monday, I tried replacing one of
the two, apparently good riser boards with one that I'd taken out, and
had put the two DIMMs that I was guessing included the bad one.

   I *still* can't provoke the error. Maybe it only happens when I have
everything fully populated? (I've run stress to the point where all 2G
of swap is used....)

   Meanwhile, I'd joined an HP forum, and someone suggested that I really,
really needed a BIOS update, and that would fix it. Sounds plausible.
However, when I found the d/l of that, I ran into three things: first,
the damn thing was an .exe, and they do *not* seem to have a .bin.
Second, the "description" (laughable, at best) didn't seem to say
anything about ECC errors, but whatever. Then there's the biggie: it
*seems* to say that I have to install a previous BIOS update first...
but I'm not sure. I would have thought it was a full package.

   Now, as the system is long out of warranty, and there's no way the
other Institute will spring to pay HP, they won't even talk to me about
*anything*, so I'm on my own.

   The upshot: does anyone here have a clue as to whether I can flash
update the BIOS with the latest update, or whether I actually have to
do the older one first?

   Thanks in advance.

            mark