Hello folks,

in my desperation and research I stumbled upon this forum, where you could maybe help me, or at least shed some light on the matter.

I bought a used Dell R210 II for my homelab, popped in the bootable ISO to update all the firmware - it flashed some things, said to wait, the screen got black... and eventually I rebooted - only to find out that the machine doesnt post.

Those of you familiar with Dell servers, will know that they have a remote management solution called iDrac. IDrac reports the last boot as 0x0 No POST.. it also reports the BIOS Version as 1.2.3, the flashed version should be 2.8.0, so im not sure if its really bricked since idrac can "detect" the version..

on reddit, someone offered to dump his chip, all i needed was a usb programmer and a soic8 test clip to write the dump... ive ordered those, but the person hasnt responded in a few days, so my question is:

1) would this even work? looking at the forums, there might be more this, like something called the ME region..

2) would anyone happen to have a r210 ii, who could dump the bios?

3) i dumped my "broken" flash, is there a way to validate the dump... to check if the bios is indeed screwed? here is the bios with the chip name detected by the ch341a: https://drive.google.com/open?id=1_P8jRh...LZxB9KteHQGmmXz

I appreciate any help and/or other suggestions

Danke Dieter, hoffentlich findet sich jemand der mir helfen kann:)

thanks for the quick repsonse! ive adjusted the viewing permissions for the link... and ill try flashing your attached file as soon as i get home

Zitat von plutomaniac im Beitrag #4

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I cannot download your corrupt dump (private sharing maybe), try compressing and attaching it here. Either way, the Dell BIOS for that model includes an entire 8MB SPI image (Flash Descriptor + ME + BIOS) which you can flash back with a programmer such as CH341A. That's the best solution as other people's dumps might have system-specific initialization BIOS and/or ME data or similar.

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I already flashed the regular BIOS over the OEM version, but I did the selection on the regular BIOS file as instructed, and the BOF and EOF do line up - so I'm assuming it would work. As luck would have it, in the meantime somebody else on had the exact same problem today on r/homelab, and I'm glad I was able to pay it forward by giving him a rundown of the whole process to fix the issue... thanks to you.

Danke nochmals!