Friday, February 1, 2013

Dell Poweredge firmware update failed on hard drives

Problem: I recently was preparing my Dell Poweredge R715 servers for Windows Server 2012 and figured I should grab the Dell Server Update utility and perform all necessary firmware updates.

The update succeeded for most items, but failed on the hard drives. Actually one of the three internal drives succeeded (AS08) but the other two were left at the old revision (AS02). What I didn't realize immediately (because the updates were performed remotely) was that this caused the RAID container to enter a degraded state. Unfortunately the upgraded drive wouldn't firmware update using either the Dell utility (due to the degraded state of the container), nor could I rebuild the drive using Dell's server manager, as the option just didn't exist (due to the differing revisions perhaps?).

Solution: With some googling I found this posting. Thanks to user AGAG70 for the tip to use the free MegaRAID Storage Manager utility from LSI here. I downloaded the .zip file. Extracted it on the host server, performed a custom install and chose the "install components to manage this local server" (or something to that extent). Once installed I ran the software, selected the Physical tab and could see the drive that was degraded. I right clicked it and told it to rebuild. It looks like this utility can do firmware updates as well, but I think I'll try the Dell server utility again once the container is fully functional.

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