Update Dell R710 BIOS

Hello everyone, after about a week of work I finally managed to update the BIOS of my Dell R710 server and so I went from version 2.2.1 to 6.6.0 (the latest available). Since I googled things for a week before actually figuring out how to do it, I’m posting here the quickest and easiest solution to the problem I’ve found.

So first you need to get the live operating system (it’s a version of CentOS tweaked by Dell) to be loaded via USB from the following link:

https://www.dell.com/support/home/it/it/itbsdt1/drivers/driversdetails?driverid=c31j4

It says it doesn’t work on generation 11 (that of the R710 in this case) but it works. Once we have downloaded the SLI (in my case version 3.0.0) we load it on a USB stick with Rufus for example.

Now you are practically ready, insert the key just created in the server and press the power key, during boot press the F11 key to access the boot menu and start the key just inserted. A selection menu will begin in which you have to choose the Linux support … and here you will arrive at the live operating system.

From here you will have a very normal operating system, with a browser from which to download the BIOS and everything you think is to be updated. Download in file by selecting the Red Hat operating system in any version. Once you have downloaded the BIOS.bin go to the download folder via shell and type

chmod + x [the file] .bin

and then

sudo ./[ just the file] .bin

at this point it will ask you to proceed first and then restart, confirming both choices with Y [yes] the server will restart and at this point you will have updated the BIOS of your DELL R710, to confirm during the boot check the version of the BIOS written under the DELL logo.

For questions or concerns, please ask below