Recently, I purchased an auction lot of a dozen or so Dell PowerEdge R610 and R710 servers from an auction. Part of my initial evaluation of the servers was to update the firmware. I started with the R610 servers.
To do so, I created a bootable thumb drive with the Support Live Image 3.0 using CentOS 7.4 from Dell’s R610 driver page. The filename is SLI_3.0.0_A00.iso.
To create the bootable drive, I used balenaEtcher on my MacBook, but you can also use Rufus if you’re on Windows. You just need to create a bootable drive.
Next, I put the bin file for the BIOS on a thumb drive to load from CentOS. The most recent BIOS for the R610 as of the date of this post is version 6.6.0. The filename is BIOS_0YV9D_LN_6.6.0.BIN.
Once in the CentOS with the boot drive, I opened a terminal window and loaded the BIOS thumb drive with the following command:
$ cd /run/media/sliuser/R610/
My bin file was in the root of the drive, so now I just needed to run it to update the BIOS. I tried to use:
$ sudo ./BIOS_0YV9D_LN_6.6.0.BIN
However, it failed.
I tried a number of commands and finally was able to push the update through by using the following commands:
# sudo bash
# bash ./BIOS_0YV9D_LN_6.6.0.BIN
I would write more but I just dug this post out of my drafts that have been sitting for months. Hopefully, this process so far helps someone get unstuck. If there is traction on the topic or more questions, I’ll dig back in and flesh it our further…