PowerEdge: iDRAC Recovery Procedure with firmimg.d7

The purpose of this article is to recover an iDRAC that is unable to boot, without replacing any parts. This tutorial works for iDRAC 7, iDRAC 8, iDRAC 9.

In some cases, the iDRAC boot partition might become corrupt. iDRAC will fail to boot and the server can't be managed by it.

Symptoms:

• iDRAC is not ready during server POST.
• Unable to access iDRAC web page.
• System Health and Identify LED is flashed at ~1/2 second rate. (LED is located on the back of a rack and tower servers and on the front of a blade server.)

iDRAC models per PowerEdge server Generation

• iDRAC7 on 12G PowerEdge systems
• iDRAC8 on 13G PowerEdge systems
• iDRAC9 on 14G PowerEdge systems

 

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Recovering the iDRAC

iDRAC7 supports two operating system images to make sure a bootable iDRAC. In the event of an unforeseen catastrophic error and you lose both boot paths:

• iDRAC7 boot loader detects that there is no bootable image.
• System Health and Identify LED is flashed at ~1/2 second rate. (LED is located on the back of a rack and tower servers and on the front of a blade server.
• Boot loader is now polling the SD card slot.

Solution

1. Format an SD card with FAT using a Windows operating system, or EXT3 using a Linux operating system.
2. Copy firmimg.d7 to the SD card.
3. Insert the SD card into the server.
4. Boot loader detects the SD card, turns the flashing LED to solid amber, reads the firmimg.d7, reprograms iDRAC, and then reboots iDRAC7. Wait 2-5 minutes, this operation will complete automatically.

Alternative method using TFTP Server

You can use Trivial File Transfer Protocol (TFTP) server to upgrade or downgrade iDRAC firmware or install certificates. It is used in SM-CLP and RACADM command line interfaces to transfer files to and from iDRAC. The TFTP server must be accessible using an iDRAC IP address or DNS name. 
 

You can use the netstat -a command on Windows or Linux operating systems to see if a TFTP server is running. The default port for TFTP is 69. If TFTP server is not running, do one of the following:
Find another computer on the network running a TFTP service. Install a TFTP server on the operating system.