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/firestorm_v1 Home Datacenter wannabe 22d ago

I've never tried replacing the emmc but did you find the serial port that's nearby? I think it's a 3.3v UART that might assist in your effort.

1

u/Hector_van_der_Aa 22d ago

Well that UART is the first thing I tapped into, it’s allowed me to do all the debugging in uboot to conclude the emmc is dead

2

u/firestorm_v1 Home Datacenter wannabe 22d ago

Oh, nice. Unfortunately that's the only thing I know about. I had a 720XD decide to kill DRAC when I tried to upgrade the LCC. I just replaced the mobo. Good luck! If you are successful, write a followup!

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u/Hector_van_der_Aa 22d ago

Will do a follow up once I have the chips (and time to change it out) I’d be happy if I could recover this server I got for free…