HP FW Maintenence CD 7.50

[John Dufresne]

Is anyone else having trouble adding suppliments using floppies. I have trouble using the offline supplemental 2006.26.4 BIOS for the Proliant DL380 G4. It will not show up on the list after a window says it has been added and the list re-initialized. The RAID 6i controller v2.68 A offline works fine using the supplemental however. The only way I can update the BIOS on this DL380 G4 is using the older 7.40 version of the CD.

Thanks, John

[Michael Garner_1 · Accepted solution]

John,
This sounds like an error we encountered after the FWCD was released where if you created a supplemental update on a Windows system and copied it to a floppy to use with the FWCD supplemental update, the case of the filename prevented it from being detected. To fix this, you can rename the file on the floppy as CP00xxxx.scexe (case is important). By default, Windows will uppercase the name and prevent it from working in a supplemental update environment. We've fixed this for our next release that will be out this fall.

There are a number of ways to work around this problem where you don't need to use the supplemental update feature and boot to the FWCD.

First, you can create a USB key containing the contents of the FWCD by using the scripts in the \usb directory on the CD. Once you have a USB key created, you can drop all your new components in the \compaq\swpackages directory and they will be automatically detected by the HP Smart Update Manager utility.

You can run the HP Smart Update Manager utility directly from within the operating system (online mode) by running it by using the autorun feature, clicking on the "Firmware" tab and selecting "Install Firmware". Running HP SUM online is equivalent to running it offline with the exception of hard drive flash. Hard drives must be updated offline in the FWCD 7.50.

Since autorun won't execute automatically on a USB key, you'll need to execute it directory from the root of the key by calling the \_autorun\autorun_win.exe file directly.

You can also boot from the USB key and use it as you would the CD. Since you can add your files directly to the key, this allows you to keep up to date.

Michael Garner
HP Firmware CD Development Lead