We have some PowerEdge CS24 servers that won't run Windows Server 2008. Both installer and cloned images promptly BSOD on boot with an error The BIOS in this system is not fully ACPI compliant
. I noticed the ones that did work had a newer bios version. So I've set about looking for bios firmware updates for these servers.
First looked at the motherboard for a specific model number, but I did not find one. A search on Google resulted in a Dell manual for PowerEdge C1100 that says Regulatory Model: CS24-TY
. The provided bios updates for that system (Red Hat version) failed, but at least returned a potentially useful error message:
Your system: CS24-VSS
Further searching on Dell's site or Google for "Poweredge CS24-VSS" yielded no useful results. Nor was I even able to find the two firmware version we already have: S29S3A03
or S29S3A10
.
The AMIBIOS displays version info, but doesn't show anything else about the motherboard:
I used the service tag on Dell's support to reach an article that said:
Currently, there is no online documentation for your selected product.
Where should I go to find bios firmware updates for PowerEdge CS24-VSS?
I installed CentOS 5 on one of the machines to run the Dell Server Update Utility version 5.5, however it failed to detect any known devices, and the server log includes messages such as this is not a Dell Machine.
[root@centos ~]# getSystemId
Libsmbios version: 2.2.27
Product Name: CS24-VSS
Vendor: Dell
BIOS Version: S29S3A03
System ID: Traceback (most recent call last):
File "/usr/sbin/getSystemId", line 124, in ?
sys.exit( main() )
File "/usr/sbin/getSystemId", line 106, in main
sys.stdout.write( "%s\n" % info[1]() )
File "/usr/sbin/getSystemId", line 52, in get_system_id
return "0x%04X" % sysinfo.get_dell_system_id()
File "<libsmbios_c._peak_util_decorators.rewrap wrapping libsmbios_c._common._errorOnZeroFN at 0x09680614>", line 3, in _errorOnZeroFN
File "/usr/lib/python2.4/site-packages/libsmbios_c/trace_decorator.py", line 108, in trace
result = func(*args, **kw)
File "/usr/lib/python2.4/site-packages/libsmbios_c/_common.py", line 57, in _errorOnZeroFN
_doExc(exception_fn, result, func, args, _("function returned error value of zero") )
File "/usr/lib/python2.4/site-packages/libsmbios_c/_common.py", line 26, in _doExc
raise exception_fn(r, f, a)
Exception: Could not determine System ID.
Seems like a dead end at this point.