C240M3 hangs on boot

[Stephen J.]

I'm new to Cisco servers.

I have a C240M3 that hangs on boot at the "Configuring and testing memory..." statement.

Usually it will hang there indefinitely -- at least several hours.

Occasionally it will say that the BIOS is corrupt and display the procedure for recovering the BIOS via a recovery.cap file on USB media.

I don't know the exact version of the BIOS that is on this server -- its sister servers that were ordered at the same time were 1.5.x.

I have tried the recovery procedure (using the jumper) three times with different BIOS versions (3.0.1c, 2.0.4c, 1.5.7e). It always takes several boots before it sees the USB file. In each instance, it appears to do the update, powers down, waits ~7 minutes, powers back up, and hangs again at the "Configuring and testing memory..." statement. Moving the jumper back to the original location, or not, appears to make no difference.

The CIMC doesn't currently have an IP assigned (it shows 0.0.0.0), so I'm guessing using it for recovery is not a possibility.

Any ideas?

[Yasser Al-Alem]

Hi,

refer to below links to recover BIOS :

http://www.cisco.com/c/en/us/td/docs/unified_computing/ucs/c/hw/C240/install/C240/install.html#89328

https://supportforums.cisco.com/discussion/12178841/cisco-ucs-c240-m3-bios-flash-image-corrupted

[Stephen J.]

Thank you for your reply.

However if you read my post carefully, the links you provide show steps that I have already tried, without success.

[Yasser Al-Alem]

Hi Stefan,

Did you put recovery.cap file only on USB or the HUU.ISO file

[Stephen J.]

I used the recovery.cap extracted from the huu*.iso images. For at least one version, I had to rename bios.cap to recovery.cap.

Does the version of the recovery.cap file need to exactly match the CIMC firmware version? If so, how can I determine if with the server in this non-booting state?

[Yasser Al-Alem]

not necessarily, but since all servers were shipped at same time they will same CIMC version , so as you mentioned you can use 1.5.x image.

try to use 1st procedure{without jumper}:

http://www.cisco.com/c/en/us/td/docs/unified_computing/ucs/c/hw/C240/install/C240/install.html#89328

and make sure to format USB before adding rec fie

[Kirk J]

If you are having issues with the jumper based/ recovery method, you may want to hook up a laptop with some sort of freebie DHCP server,connected via Cat 5 patch cable to the 1st 1Gb LOM port.

The CIMC is set by default to use DHCP in sharedLOM mode.

If you can get an IP assigned via DHCP to your CIMC, then that gives you more options including using the web firmware uploader for the CIMC and the BIOS, as well, and may help get a valid BIOS image into play.

Thanks,

Kirk...