R210 II BIOS 2.10 'BIOS Update failed using RBU method'

Question

Yesterday Dell posted the 2.10 BIOS update for the R210 to address the latest speculation control exploit.

I downloaded the BIOS update package for Windows and after it asks to upgrade from 2.09 to 2.10, the update fails after about 20 seconds with the following message:

"BIOS update failed using RBU method"

The error code given is 0001.

No other information is provided. I haven't had this issue installing the update on any other servers. I have already tried clearing the NVRAM, downloading both the Win32 and Win64 BIOS updates, and also tried downloading the 2.09 update and reinstalling it, but all of them fail with the same error.

jcap14 · Accepted Answer

@jcap14 wrote:

Yesterday Dell posted the 2.10 BIOS update for the R210 to address the latest speculation control exploit.

I downloaded the BIOS update package for Windows and after it asks to upgrade from 2.09 to 2.10, the update fails after about 20 seconds with the following message:

"BIOS update failed using RBU method"

The error code given is 0001.

No other information is provided. I haven't had this issue installing the update on any other servers. I have already tried clearing the NVRAM, downloading both the Win32 and Win64 BIOS updates, and also tried downloading the 2.09 update and reinstalling it, but all of them fail with the same error.

Alright, so I think I figured out the cause of the problem. Somehow, the update must have failed at some point and wrote some information to the registry, which the updater checks before upgrading the BIOS. If this registry key is present or corrupt, the update fails with this error message.

I removed the registry keys:

HKLM\SOFTWARE\Dell\Dell System Update\

HKLM\SOFTWARE\Dell Computer Corporation\DellHAPI

HKLM\SOFTWARE\Dell Computer Corporation\UpdatePackage

Some of the keys in UpdatePackage were BiosPkgVer, biosupdatepending, dellcomcorpkeypresence, and hapiuninstallpending. These keys were set to 1 even though no update was in progress. Once I deleted everything, the update completed successfully.

jcap14 · Answer

Also, I want to add that on the other servers I installed this BIOS update on, it does NOT patch CVE-2018-3639 as detailed in the release notes.

Running Get-SpeculationControlSettings returns:

Hardware is vulnerable to speculative store bypass: True
Hardware support for speculative store bypass mitigation is present: False

AlywaysT · Answer

Not sure how you figured out that these registry entries were the issue but deleting them solved my problem. In my case I had run SUU 17.12 on a R610 server but the process failed and l after that was unable to upgrade/downgrade my BIOS. Another symptom in my case was that OMSA would not show any other categories in the left pane under system other than the BIOS category. Once the registry entries were gone, all went back to normal and I was able to upgrade mi BIOS manually (since using SUU 17.12 would consistently crash leaving these registry entries behind). Thanks much for sharing your findings!

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R210 II BIOS 2.10 "BIOS Update failed using RBU method"

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