Let me prefix this by saying: HOLY CRAP; Thank you everyone! In particular, My final solution was reached by following hase3d's guide
I was working from a mac so burning a bootable iso of freedos with the changes prooved challenging as I usually use ultraiso for similar things to this on PC, but my workaround was to simply burn two discs, one was a straight burn of the image of freedos, and another of freedos's contents combined with the xdiag and bc08c740.bin files, I swapped the disks once freedos was fully loaded.
I took a picture of the mac addresses of my cards as they were presented with the xdiag -b06eng command with intent to restore the same addresses when I was finished in hopes it preserved all functionality in vmware esxi which was running on this server (it seemed to work as I haven't had to make any changes in esxi after booting), but I noticed the second nic had the same mac as the first nic... so I changed the second nic by one digit (which I wasn't using in esxi anyhow and didn't need) now I am wondering if that is where the original conflict was coming from all together, I wonder if the second nic's mac was just messed up, and am curious what would happen if I had not loaded a new bin, but instead changed only the mac addresses via the nvm cfg command and rebooted.
All of that aside... IT WORKED!
I can't believe it, but IT WORKED!
I would have NEVER EVER EVER figured this out on my own, so thank you so much for going to the trouble of creating a guide for this, working download links and all!
NOTE: My server was a DL385 G5, so it probably has slightly different hardware, but the .bin link you gave worked just fine for me. My original symptoms occured almost exactly the same way. I updated firmware via the old style hp firmware disks, everything went fine. Tried to upgrade to the 2013 disk, and it wouldn't let me, so Went down to the 2012 SPP disk, and it worked fine (I didn't try loading up esxi at this point, so I don't know if the cards were working here or not, but it booted just fine). Then I loaded a 2014 disk to apply my last patches and the latest updates (it needed a firmware update from 2012 first to resolve the issue I encountered in the 2013 disk), suddenly the server would not boot! I ended up resetting the rom by opening the server and flipping switches 1, 5, and 6, as described in another tutorial I found on another site - thankfully the server booted and everything looked fine. Unfortunately I was unaware that the network cards were not working, and to resolve the issue of them not loading in vmware ESXI, I had to burn cd's with vmware driver updates (I assumed that the cards were now too "new" for esxi 5.1 to reccognize and I needed driver updates... this assumption was wrong) to no avail. Finally, I gave up and found this forum post and followed the instructions to resolve my issue. Also, in hopes some ESXI users stumble in here, I was getting " vmfs3 failed to load " errors as well as " no compatible network adapters found " errors, and despite what it may lead you to believe, my network cards were actually being seen as "removed".
THANK YOU! (sorry this is a wall of text, wife waiting for me to meet her for dinner, I just really felt the need to reply and say thanks!)
