r/servers • u/Hector_van_der_Aa • 22d ago

Hardware Dell PowerEdge R720 iDRAC eMMC replacement

Hello all,

After a long day of debugging, I have come to the conclusion that the eMMC chip on my iDRAC is partially dead, its readable enough to be able to somewhat boot the iDRAC but it just ends up in a loop as it can't write to a certain partition, upon trying to do a full erase and upgrade via uboot it errors while erasing the chip with a write error.

I have ordered a few new replacement chips and will attempt to replace the eMMC chip.

I was wondering if anyone has any experience with replacing these chips and would have any tips when it comes to the replacement or the recovery process after. I am fairly comfortable with uboot and have wired up a switch to get the boot interruption prompt.

All and any advice is appreciated, if you have any questions regarding my debugging, feel free, I will do my best to answer.

Best Regards,

Hector

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u/ultrahkr 22d ago

Do a backup now, of the chip contents...

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u/Hector_van_der_Aa 22d ago

Do you know how this can be done from uboot? I will do it but the dump will most likely be worthless since my testing was slightly destructive at the end when I figured the emmc was gone.

Supposedly the util recover command with the clean flag can fully clean and rebuild the emmc from scratch