Recovering the BMC on the Talos II

[jedavies]

Hi,
I'm currently working on flashing the BMC in my Talos II after a failed update.  Currently the system will not boot due to a corrupted image.

Using the instructions here: https://wiki.raptorcs.com/wiki/Debricking_the_BMC I am following the steps in the "Flash new BMC firmware via serial port (Open Source Method)" section.

I have some questions about the process:

1) Where is the "FPGA RUN/RESET switch" mentioned in step 3? Is this jumper J7800 on the motherboard?
2) Step 6 says it takes a long time. The flashrom process has now been running for over 35 hours and is at 81% of the initial "Reading old flash chip contents..." step. How much longer will this take? Should it really take several days to flash the BMC?
3) Assuming the process completes, the final step says to set the "FPGA RUN/RESET switch" again... I then power off/on to complete the process?

Thanks,
James

[jedavies]

Just to update, the flashing process is now completed after about 48 hours. Hopefully I won't have to do this method again since I can now upgrade firmware through the web UI, but it would be good to know if there was some other issue causing this to take so long.

[surf]

Wow, it sounds like the serial was running at 1992 dial-up speeds.  I'm glad you got it back up and running.  Since the chips are in sockets, how hard would it be to flash a backup pair?  Are the chips hot=swappable, or is that a "chicken and the egg" situation where you would need a separate way to program the chip outside of the Talos II board?

[jedavies]

I've ordered a USB chip flasher and some spare chips, so I'll have an alternative method if this happens again.

Also I'm now on the 2.01-beta PNOR firmware. The 2.00 version had the booting issue since I have an LSI SAS controller. The 2.01-beta version seems to work fine though.

[ullbeking]

@jedavies What device were you using to flash the BMC chip?  And what settings did it have?