UCS-FI-6296UP -- bricked due to stuck / failed firmware update

RudiStang · ‎05-25-2022

Hello,

this is FI #2 for our 2nd UCS BladeCenter and the firmware update got stuck in the state of rebooting.

Now the FI is 100% bricked -- as I took a look at it's LEDs few days later I realized, that Eth Ports were online, but all the SFP connectors were down (no LED)

The 4 fans were running at normal speed, but no green LED indicator lights for all of them.

So I connected to the serial management port, unplugged power, waited 2 or 3 minutes, reconneced power and at the serial port PuTTY doesn't receive any output.

So looks like this FI doesn't even *START* to boot.

To verify, that the COM connection setup is fine the blue cisco cable was plugged to the operational FI #1, there everything is fine.

So the question is, are there any options to ressusitate the device?
I couldn't locate any hardware reset hole. With google I also couldn't find any user guide pointing out e.g. a hardware reset jumper.

Maybe plugging in a specially prepared USB thumb drive could help out of this situation?

Any suggestions appreciated,

TIA,

Rudi

Christian210876 · ‎06-03-2022

Hi Rudi,

Sound like you have a dead Fabric. If no LED status is on the fabric and you can not even see any console output on putty or other serial terminal program I think it is dead.

I have had one Fabric that took 30 min to come back online. ass it was having issues with file check in the boot process but it was showing that in the console, and also LED status was working.

I have had a Fabric die like you say no LED status and no console output and it is a RMA support case then.

Best regards.

Christian Hald

flamegri11ed · ‎06-06-2022

I don't know if this is relevant, but one of our FI's, 6296, would not boot after a maintenance slot power-down. We left it powered on in that state and running on 1 FI )it booted after a week. Only saw this article today"(Field Notice: FN - 64094 - Nexus 5596/UCS FI 6296 - System Fails to Boot After a Power Cycle - Workaround Provided - Cisco)" Don't know if it is related.