PE C6100 / XS23-TY BMC Not Alive/Not Present ::: Recovery Procedure

This may be very useful as it seems many people face the issue of C6100 nodes crashing when adding LAN parameters to the BMC from BIOS. This can crash the BMC/corrupt the firmware so the node no longer sees the BMC. The node will appear to not function, but if you give it ~20 minutes, it will will typically POST and give the message "BMC Not Alive" during POST.

The issue is recoverable, the problem is corrupt firmware.

First download the C6100 BMC firmware update from Dell: http://www.dell.com/support/home/us/en/04/Drivers/DriversDetails?driverId=9VJW6&fileId=3259943752&osCode=NAA&productCode=poweredge-c6100&languageCode=EN&categoryId=ES

You’ll want the first option on the page labeled “Floppy.”

You'll need to create a DOS bootable flash drive, I usually use a program called Rufus.. https://rufus.akeo.ie/ 

Once you’ve got the DOS disk created:

Run the.exe that was downloaded from Dell, it will extract two directories- KCSFlash and SOCFlash, copy them both directly to the DOS drive.

Now boot the node to the DOS drive- you may need to press F11 in POST to get the boot menu where you can select the drive.

Once you’ve booted to the drive and have reached the DOS command line, commands will be as follows:

cd socflash

cd dos

flash8.bat

Reboot back to the DOS drive to run KCSflash:

 cd kcsflash

cd dos

KCSFLASH -c 0 -t 0 -i 5442H133.ROM –r

(the batch file found with KCS does nothing)

SOCFlash is a utility provided by the chip manufacturer, it doesn't care what state the BMC is in, if it detects the chip, it will flash it and effectively repair it. Once it is working with factory firmware, it will take the Dell firmware. KCSFlash is the Dell firmware utility.

glhf