At some point I'm going to do a detailed write-up of my experiences. Here are a few more tidbits.
There are definitely 2 BIOS slots. The update tools will only touch slot 1. There's probably some secret option to use slot 2. You're not going to brick these units.
If you remove the cover, there are 2 tiny pushbuttons between the power and Ethernet jacks. Other posts have suggested these have magical properties that can disable the watchdog and/or enable missing Ethernet ports. I think they just force a reboot from the corresponding BIOS slot.
I lost the
I350 Ethernet ports after upgrading the BIOS. They were no longer displayed in
lspci outside of OS-Diag. That's when I started playing with the tiny pushbuttons. No combination I tried would bring back the I350 ports-- at least not with the newer BIOS. I then held the real reset button until 'Factory Reset' came over the console. That
did restore
all the ports. I think some of the previous BIOS initialization has been offloaded to
DXE, and before the factory reset, DXE did not have a profile defined.
However, after the factory reset, DXE also noticed that I had removed the mini PCIe Wi-Fi module. DXE would reboot multiple times with the primary BIOS and then repeat with the second BIOS. DXE would finally give up and boot from the second BIOS. That did not help me since the old BIOS has an
SR-IOV bug that I was hoping to fix. I had swapped the Wi-Fi module for a 1TB NVMe SSD with Proxmox installed and working nicely. Boot had never complained previously.
I figured I had 2 options. Either put the Wi-Fi module back and move my NVMe to USB 3.0, or see if DXE would disappear if I went back to really old BIOS with the SR-IOV bug. Not liking either choice, I started poking around in the Diag-OS. There's an
eepromtool where I could have changed the device and/or serial number. Maybe try to fake a model without Wi-Fi. I decided this was too risky. There's also an
nvramtool. I found that setting
0x54 to
0 (disable
POST) solved my problem. DXE has relented and lets the unit boot (first time) with the 'critical' Wi-Fi module missing. The memory tests still run on boot.
At some point after updating the BIOS (many times), the default password (<service tag>!) was not accepted. I still had full privileges as 'User' rather than 'Administrator'. I found that 'Restore Defaults' in the BIOS also resynced the password.
So, there's a happy ending, but there were multiple times where I wanted to cry.