Just a quick post about a problem I’m sure someone else might encounter if you happend to use old HP servers.
I needed to upgrade the BIOS and the HP LO100i firmware. But on the HP websites they only provided a tool that creates the required floppy disks to perform the flash. Well, that won’t work since I haven’t got any floppy drives on my DL145 G1.
Here is how I managed to successfully upgrade the firmware using a USB-stick:
- Download the floppy disk “images” from HP website. They are really .exe files that creates bootable floppies that contain the new firmware and flash tools.
- This step might be optional, but I installed Windows Server 2003 inside VirtualBox for maximum compatibility with their tools. I then gave my virtual machine direct access to my USB-stick and ran all the steps below inside the virtual machine.
- Install a virtual floppy drive
- Install Rufus
- Use Rufus to create a bootable USB-stick with FreeDOS as operating system
- Use the HP tools to write the required files to the virtual floppy drive
- Create a folder called “flash” on the newly created bootable USB-stick (lets pretend it’s mounted as K:)
- Copy all files from A:\ (including hidden ones) to K:\flash
- Unmount the USB-stick and boot your DL145 using the USB-stick
- Once booted into FreeDOS run the flash tool we copied earlier to the “flash” folder like this:
“c:\flash\rompaq.exe /l:us /! “ - Follow the instuctions
- Congratulations, you should now have successfully flashed the new firmware
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It’s actually a nice and useful piece of info. I am happy that you just shared this helpful information with us.
Please keep us informed like this. Thank you for sharing.
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It’s a long shot, but you wouldn’t happen to still have a copy of these bios images, would you? I got hold of a second hand DL145, and I suspect it’s bios is having issues and I’m not having a lot of luck with HP without a service contract.
Thanks.
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No I don’t have them but I see that the link to the drivers/firmware for DL145 G1 was broken, so I updated the link. They can still be downloaded from the HP website:
http://h20566.www2.hpe.com/hpsc/swd/public/readIndex?sp4ts.oid=398206&swLangOid=8&swEnvOid=1005