Category: Bare Metal

How to upgrade your 4-bay Dell PowerEdge R620 to an 8-bay backplane

Tyler Woods

There are many cheap Dell R620s floating around on ebay, and if you can catch one at the right price, it might only have a 4-bay backplane. This is a quick fix, though, unless you have no need for the local storage space. Personally I just upgraded mine to an 8-bay and decided I would document the steps of what it took. Parts: You will need a few parts. Actually just two. Dell 8-bay Backplane –  KVGG1 Dell wide-SAS to dual mini-SAS cable – TK2VY   Installation: I originally took photos…

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How to fix Dell Deployment Toolkit “apply bundles.sh is invalid”

Tyler Woods

When I booted the Dell Deployment Toolkit ISO for a few of my poweredge servers, I was given an error: “apply_bundles.sh is invalid” When you see this prompt, it’s necessary to re-mount the USB drive to continue using the toolkit. Here’s what you can do to mount your USB drive properly so the installation can proceed: 1. Press <ALT>+<F2> to access a new console 2. Press <Enter> to access a command prompt 3. Type “lsblk” and press <Enter> 4. Look for the file system size that corresponds with the size…

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How to crossflash PERC H310 to IT mode LSI 9211-8i firmware (HBA for FreeNAS, UnRAID)

Tyler Woods

Flash PERC H310 to IT mode for use with FreeNAS, UnRAID, etc. The PERC H310 is a pretty standard and widely available PCI express RAID controller. A few of my servers have come with them, and I never really ended up using them. It would appear as though this piece-of-crap RAID controller might actually be of some use after all! For those who stumbled upon this article by some mythical way with no knowledge of why you would want to do this to your PERC H310, well, the goal here…

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Upgrade your Dell PowerEdge Firmware from a bootable ISO

Tyler Woods

This is the easiest (most hands-off, unattended) way to upgrade your server’s firmware/drivers, especially when you don’t run Windows but instead a hypervisor such as VMWare ESXi.     Here’s how you can do it. Download the ISO See the chart below for finding a repository to download your bootable media: (These updates are hosted on box.com but it is an official Dell download center.) PowerEdge Server Generation 13 Tower: PowerEdge T130 PowerEdge T330 PowerEdge T430 PowerEdge T630 Rack: PowerEdge R230 PowerEdge R330 PowerEdge R430 PowerEdge R530 PowerEdge R530xd PowerEdge…

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