Red Screen of Death Using NVMe BiFurcation Device

[Triston]

Hi everyone,

I've got an older DL380p Gen8 that I'm giving a "face-lift". It's decked out with 12Gbps SAS HBA, top tier CPUs, 192GB of 1866MHz RAM, etc. Pales in comparison to today's models, but it will do the trick for my needs. Part of this facelift includes adding NVMe drives which will form a ZFS pool on Proxmox. However, the chosen PCIe to M.2 Bifurcation device (QNAP QM2-2P-384 Dual M.2) appears to be causing a Red Screen of Death anytime I attempt to boot into BIOS, USB, or SSD while the cards are in my risers (I have two of them). Inside the QNAP M.2 cards, I have four 1TB Samsung 980 Pro NVMe drives fresh from the factory. 

So far I have attempted to resolve this by:

• Performing a system reset using the System Maintenance Switch (with and without battery removal)
• Reset BIOS to default
• Reconfigured default BIOS settings to ensure that they are not disabling PCIe or forcing any weird modes.
• Changing all performance settings.

The BIOS claims to be 2018 Copyright, and my iLO4 is 2.61. I'm not sure where to acquire a newer BIOS or iLO4 but I believe there should be an RPM or EXE that can be decompressed and subsequently installed via HPONCFG. If anyone has any advice on the latest BIOS repository, or other possible solutions to the issues I'm facing, that would be exceptional. 

When I return to work on Monday, I plan on attempting to change the boot method from BIOS to UEFI. 

Thanks!

Triston

[KevinSpringPM]

FW updates are on support.hpe.com, however I don't think that server ever supported nvme drives so officially there probably won't be a fix in there, although it can't hurt to try.

[ksram]

Hi,

Sharing the links : 

BIOS : https://support.hpe.com/hpesc/public/swd/detail?swItemId=MTX_1bdec773834044b6825d2ff850#tab-history

iLO : https://support.hpe.com/hpesc/public/swd/detail?swItemId=MTX_a9ec0cf26b8c4f0e9ddd4d3f67#tab-history

You may download the exe files and extract them.

Login to iLO GUI and use the bin and flash file to update the iLO and BIOS from iLO GUI

Post that restart the Server.

Thank you

RamKS

[Triston]

Hi RamKS!

Excellent thank you for those simple steps and sharing those links! I was looking for the Debian / Ubuntu repository for both iLO4 and the ROM BIOS, however I was able to download the EXEs and extract the bin files onto my Linux laptop just the same. In future, for my working servers which are also Gen8 and 9 which are all running Proxmox or Debian on bare metal, is there a non-authentication repository for them?

On the HPE SDR Page there is an indication that the FWPP repository requires authentication. I can get HPONCFG for Linux via the MCP repository, but beyond that I'm not sure if there is a more long-term method of downloading the latest iLO4 and BIOS firmwares without manually downloading an exe. 

Thanks so much for your time!

Triston

[ksram]

Hi,

You are welcome.

I guess thats the only option for the SDR Page.

Only the few Firmware we can use iLO GUI

Thank you

RamKS