Bios v1.04 for Dell C6100 XS23-TY3

[ssheikh]

Hi all,

I upgraded to v1.70 from Dell's website and now I cant get the add-in graphics card which was working under 1.04 (at least in the bios screens - never tested it past that) to work anymore. Should have made a backup of the old bios.

Anyone know if 1.04 is available for download from anyplace? Or anyone out there still running 1.04?

Thanks,

Shahid

 

[Rain]

Do you still have another node that has v1.04 on it, or did you upgrade all your nodes at once? (Or do you only have one node?)

 

[ssheikh]

Sadly upgraded all of them and regretting that. Lots of little problems after the upgrade. 1.71 was the worst with a constant Bad CMOS checksum, not being able to save CMOS changes, processor speed being stuck at 2.13 GHz, and Processor mismatch error. 1.70 seems pretty stable except that I cannot use a USB keyboard before the OS boots up. The only way I can get into the BIOS is through the BMC remote console.

3 of my nodes were 1.04. One out of the box was 1.70. The one that was 1.70 I was able to upgrade to 1.71 and did not have any problems like I did on the 1.04s.

 

[nev_neo]

Sadly upgraded all of them and regretting that. Lots of little problems after the upgrade. 1.71 was the worst with a constant Bad CMOS checksum, not being able to save CMOS changes, processor speed being stuck at 2.13 GHz, and Processor mismatch error. 1.70 seems pretty stable except that I cannot use a USB keyboard before the OS boots up. The only way I can get into the BIOS is through the BMC remote console.

3 of my nodes were 1.04. One out of the box was 1.70. The one that was 1.70 I was able to upgrade to 1.71 and did not have any problems like I did on the 1.04s.

I've had that issue of bad CMOS checksum after upgrading to 1.71
The reason I think this happened is because I had force flashed the upgrade. I had to pull the node out (power off) for it to come back up ..eventually.
Was able to fix this by running the fbios.bat file. I think it flashes both the bios and some boot block (not sure the exact term).
After that flash and poweroff/poweron process, was finally able to get into the bios and save my settings.
You would know that its working as it should when you see the "F2 for bios" line. Had to do 4 nodes last night.

Good luck !

 

[nev_neo]

Also, I had to force flash to 1.71 using the command - "afudos 6100filename.rom -x -reboot" also hit F when prompted.
2nd time around, I made sure that the 1.71 bios was the only rom file in the directory when I ran the .bat file to flash again.
After the 2nd flash, everything works great.

If you could load up windows, you could probably flash from inside windows. I used a dos bootable usb stick with all files inside.

Do not flash your BMC though. I'm glad I was able to go back to my backups, because the latest bmc does not work right..atleast for me.

 

[ssheikh]

I've had no problems upgrading BMC. No problem with DHCP or static IP. BMC boots up successfully from unplugged power every time without problem.

Have not ventured into upgrading BIOS to 1.71 again. 1.70 is running ok on two of my nodes.

The best/most stable combination so far is 5442A162.ROM with BMC 1.18

My 4 nodes are running as:

1.70B/1.33 - ESXi 5.5
1.71B/1.33 - ESXi 5.5
1.70B/1.33 - FreeNAS
1.62A/1.18 - Windows

The stickers on all 4 nodes are 1.04/1.04. None of the nodes have a window behind the mezzanine card area.