SOLVED X10SLH-F BIOS Update Hanging

[budmannxx]

I have an X10SLH-F board and just updated the IPMI firmware to the latest version (from Supermicro site). That worked fine. Now I'm trying to update the BIOS as well, and the process is hanging after the "Verifying RomHole Block...done" step. The cursor is flashing. Supermicro install notes say:

5. After you see the message of BIOS has completed the update, unplug the AC, clear the CMOS and plug in the AC and power on the system.

...so, I'm nervous to interrupt it at this point. I saw some videos of the update process, and it looks like there should be an - Update success for /FDT! message, followed by a few other success messages (example from X10SL7-Fboard: https://youtu.be/xb-srXSwoxg?t=855). My update has been hanging for about 30 minutes so far.

Does anyone have advice on what I should do?

 

[dlavigne]

What did you end up doing?

 

[budmannxx]

I waited as long as I could, and then I took the risk and power cycled (I knew there's a BIOS recovery option, so I wouldn't be totally bricked). After rebooting, the new firmware version was showing, and everything has been working fine for a couple of days. From what I can tell, the BIOS upgrade worked. Is there any way to verify that everything flashed properly (aside from just not noticing any issues)?

I'm tempted to reflash again, but I'm also tempted to just leave it as-is given it seems to be working.

(If this should be moved to Offtopic, that's fine with me. I know the post doesn't specifically relate to FreeNAS, but I am running FN11.2-U1 on this system.)

 

[DrKK]

Sir, if your system booted through the POST and BIOS startup, your BIOS upgrade worked. When they don't work, it's usually pretty serious.

Go into your IPMI and make sure that the version listed there is, in fact, the newest version.

For what it's worth, I've upgraded the BIOS in my X10SLM (which is almost identical) about 6 or 7 times with zero issues like the one you described.

 

[budmannxx]

Yep, that's pretty much what I was thinking--it seems to be working fine, so I think I'm OK. I flashed IPMI firmware before BIOS, and that went smoothly. My system is showing the latest versions of Firmware (03.72) and BIOS (3.2).

My only guess as to what happened is that I was coming from a very old BIOS version. I think I was supposed to untick some sort of "preserve settings" option, but I only realized that afterwards. I restored BIOS to recommended defaults after upgrading.

 

[DrKK]

That was going to be the next thing I said: always untick the "preserve my settings" boxes, because if you don't, there are some very strange effects that take a while to sort out.

I think you're fine sir.

Happy motoring sir.

 

[rdtmoore]

I'm experiencing a similar issue with the X10SLH-F I just purchased. Couldn't get this board to post, did some troubleshooting and was finally able to get the board to a DOS prompt for the BIOS update. Everything was chugging along well, until the Erase NCB Block Portion. I am sitting at 54% for about an hour now. Very nervous to do anything other than wait. If anyone has some advice it would be greatly appreicated. I currently have the rev 2 installed. Installing 3.4 with a Xeon E3 1241v3 processor, and 32GB Kingston PC312800 DDR 1600mHz. I have tried swapping out the RAM with some more of the same type, as well as moving the ram around to try to figure out if I had a bad slot or more. I was finally able to get the the splash screen with the option selections, but it just hung there and. I was able to allow it to boot into the USB drive finally and begin the update process of the BIOS.