Saturday, October 15, 2016

Updating firmware on BL465c G7

HP Hardware is really good. I have a couple of C7000 and C3000 blade chassis, because they're amazing value for money, and are super reliable.

So yeah. HP Hardware = Really good.

HP Software and Firmware, on the other hand, is amazingly, terribly AMAZINGLY bad.

I spent far too much time this morning trying to upgrade the BIOS on a HP465c G7 Blade. It didn't work.

I'd get the error  "Can't execute the Program table" when running the BIOS upgrade, and that was it.

After doing a bunch of research, I came to the following conclusions:
  1. HP knows it doesn't work. 
  2. HP previously had published the fix. 
  3. HP have removed the fix (for windows). 
  4. HP proudly proclaim that the fix won't be made available for Windows again, and use the Linux fix. 
  5. The Linux fix doesn't exist.
Did I mention how awful HP is?

Anyway, here's how to solve it.
  • You'll have to coldboot your blade (as in, physically pull it out of the chassis. Sorry)
  • Download this ISO - That was made by a user in this thread on the HP forums. I can only assume that HP missed it, because it's one of the few useful things in the entire place.
  • Boot from that ISO. It will boot and look like this
  • Select yes. Let it flash.
  • You will get kicked out of ILO. This wasn't an issue, I immediately reconnected without a problem.
  • You'll then see this screen. Do what it says.  (Note the ISO does *not* shut the machine down, you'll have to do that manually - shut it down, and then pull the blade)
  • Re-run the SPP and everything will work.
Note that I am using the SPP with the exact filename of SPP2015100.2015_0921.6.iso to do this, and it works.
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2 comments:

Chandler789 said...

Any ideas on how to execute the update with SPP? I don't have entitlements to get the SPP and HP will not sell me a warranty.

December 28, 2017 at 2:27 PM
Unknown said...

Hi,

an alternative way to update the firmware is to extract the CP015808.scexe file, open up the SPP iso with UltraISO or similar and copy the file to the hp\swpackages folder.
Save the iso with UltraISO and boot your server, it will pick it up as an additional package and can be applied in similar fashion to the rest of the updates.

When finished, power down your blade and either pull it out of the chassis (if you have physical access) or ssh to the chassis and run the command: reset server X
where x is the slot number of your blade.

That would trip the E-Fuse, the blade will disconnect from the chassis and reconnect a minute later and you can re-run the SPP to apply the bios update.

Hope it helps.

January 23, 2018 at 5:41 AM

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