This results in an aborted attempt to update the firmware on the identified HDD.
Error codes associate with this failure mode includes 8009 and 8017.
Error message occurs when attempting to update hard drive firmware using the Online utility in the operating system.
Update the HDD firmware using the offline Nautilus update utility available by visiting
Drivers and Downloads for the Dell Nautilus Firmware Update Utility for SAS and SATA disk and solid-state
Workarounds:
- Freeing up system resources may allow subsequent attempts to update the HDD firmware to succeed
- Booting from, the SBUU CD may address resource limitations in lean memory servers by booting to a minimal environment
- Booting into Safe Mode may free up sufficient resources to use the DUP update
Additional Information:
- The aborted attempt to flash the HDD firmware will not affect the drive, it will stay at its current firmware level
- There is no data integrity or data availability risk associated with with this issue
- This error is most likely to be seen when running Windows 2008 with less than 8GB of memory
- This error can occur on servers running Windows 2003
DUP utilizes the LSI storlib driver which in turn calls the Microsoft IOCTL_SCSI_MINIPORT and IOCTL_SCSI_PASS_THROUGH drivers to talk directly to SAS / SATA devices. While not a hard limitation, Microsoft recommends only sending commands in 32k bytes to the IOCTL_SCSI_MINIPORT and IOCTL_SCSI_PASS_THROUGH drivers. This does not mean the IOCTL_SCSI_MINIPORT and IOCTL_SCSI_PASS_THROUGH will fail commands over 32k bytes, only that Microsoft is recommending using 32k bytes based on potential memory management concerns.
Because current DUP utilizes Non-Segmented Firmware download commands the entire command is attempting to send 1MB+ firmware files sizes through this same driver that Microsoft recommends limiting to 32k bytes. Some hard drives have limitations for sending smaller segmented downloads. Because of these conflicting requirements sometimes firmware download errors are unavoidable.
What this means related to DUP, is while commands over 32k may work, in systems of limited memory, larger configurations or running multiple DUP packages will use more memory resources and may prevent the DUP package from completing successful firmware download.
An unsuccessful download should not degrade or corrupt the RAID volume. As the drive will not attempt to flash firmware until the entire firmware package is received. In the IOCTL_SCSI_MINIPORT and IOCTL_SCSI_PASS_THROUGH 32k recommendation from Microsoft, the download would fail before the entire firmware package is received. Once the firmware package is received the drive would then verify the firmware (CRC) and save the current firmware for recovery before applying the new firmware. The later part of the update the CRC check, saving current firmware and updating firmware is handled internally by the drive and would not cause a failure related to IOCTL_SCSI_MINIPORT and IOCTL_SCSI_PASS_THROUGH drivers limitation.