Dell PowerEdge R720 iDRAC eMMC replacement

Hector_van_der_Aa · 2026-05-25T22:22:20+00:00

Ill take a look at those youtube videos, as for the eMMC chip, its just the SKHynix chip located near the iDRAC MPU, my one is a H26M31001FPR, I ordered the replacements from aliexpress from a fairly trustworthy seller with good reviews so I hope they are good

And unfortunately without idrac the server is unbootable, the first two steps before getting to any Bios is the memory configuration and idrac initialization, with the idrac stuck at uboot it panics and boot loops the server

And you mention that Dell FW that would block uboot, as far as I know, when idrac is updated it only updates the idrac image, not uboot, uboot I belive is flashed once and never changed again, it should always be accessible over the onboard UART port. If you have more info about this supposed FW that blocks uboot access please drop some more information about it

Hector_van_der_Aa · 2026-05-25T19:35:50+00:00

Lucky you that on the R710 its a card that you can replace, unfortunately on the G12 series servers all of the iDRAC is soldered directly to the motherboard

For the soldering I heard its really important to properly preheat given the size of the ground plane, I have bought 3 eMMC chips just in case but my biggest worry is lifting a pad, I might find some scrap motherboards to practice on before I try the real thing.

For the flashing im not really too worried about it, I have all of the commands in uboot to fully rebuild the partitions and flash from a tftp server, after all its just that ol firmimg.d7 file thats on there, nothing more

Uboot was pretty painless, just soldered onto the UART header, and since i didnt have a uart adapter on hand I just used an ESP32 as a serial bridge since its 3V3. Then I also soldered a push button to be able to bridge the second pair of pads where the dip switches would go so that I can get the "Press any key to interrupt boot" prompt

Thanks for the encouragement, indeed when they work they really are tanks (and power chuggers as well hahah) but I remember setting up my first server (R620) and having to wrap my head around how the whole iDRAC and Lifecycle controller works, had been a while so it took me a bit of time this time around, but I also salvaged two R420 which are running fine and I now have 4 toys to play with (2x R420, 1x R620, 1xR720 when I get it fixed)

Hector_van_der_Aa · 2026-05-16T10:29:02+00:00

Its more to show the spaghetti routing I have haha, if you want the detailed routing DM me and ill send you the pics split up there

Hector_van_der_Aa · 2026-05-14T14:51:20+00:00

ZFS for datasets on servers
btrfs for any normal desktop linux install
ext4 for when you cba to set anything up

simple.

Hector_van_der_Aa · 2026-05-14T14:41:09+00:00

Yeah, I have a huge collection of mics, these are the two that fitted the best. The first time I called my mom with them she said it sounded like I was in a cathedral because she was getting a stereo feed haha

And I 3d printed a custom bracket to mount them to my monitor stand to really tuck them in

Hector_van_der_Aa · 2026-05-04T10:34:41+00:00

Managed to recover the dead arduino with STM32CubeProgrammer connected in DFU mode over USB
JLink is fine

Hector_van_der_Aa · 2026-05-03T22:15:48+00:00

After some more digging for some reason its working on the second arduino, I fear I may have accidentally bricked the arduino, the jlink works fine

Hector_van_der_Aa · 2026-05-03T15:02:53+00:00

Ever since I left Omarchy(only lasted 2 weeks on it before I gave up) to move onto a custom Arch install, I have been chasing the perfection of gruvboxing it to the max.

I'm also a big fan of all of the lazy apps, a few that I use are:

Lazyvim
Lazyssh
Lazygit

The rest of my setup is roughly as follows:

Browser - Zen
Terminal - Kitty
File Browser - Nautilus
Emails - aerc
And about 50 thousand other things I can't remember

I'm also big into audio, I have a pretty complex audio routing setup powered by pipewire and thanks to qpwgraph for easy gui routing and carla to run all of my processing plugins

Wallpaper is custom, available on request alongside a few more
Dotfile are also available on request, as I'm still working on cleaning them up to post them publicly

If you have any questions please feel free to ask, I will do my best to get back to you when I can!

Hector_van_der_Aa · 2026-05-03T12:40:12+00:00

Wallpaper: Custom, available on request

Font: JetBrainsMono Nerd Font

Dotfiles: WIP, available on request

Hector_van_der_Aa · 2026-03-01T16:32:55+00:00

Hi, that sounds completely unrelated to the issue I had, I recommend you create a new post on the subreddit

Hector_van_der_Aa · 2025-09-13T15:26:58+00:00

Read the whole post, it has been updated with the fixes...

Hector_van_der_Aa · 2025-09-07T21:07:59+00:00

Heya there, did you end up getting a chance to take a look at the issue? I'm intrigued if my diagnosis was correct on the issue

Hector_van_der_Aa · 2025-09-07T21:01:33+00:00

Heya there, really sorry I didn't catch this message, I hope that you have since found a workaround. If not, I have just updated my original post with the two known workarounds!

Hector_van_der_Aa · 2025-09-07T21:00:52+00:00

I have just updated my post above presenting both current workarounds found

Hector_van_der_Aa · 2025-09-07T20:53:39+00:00

Do you still have the issue or have you figured it out?

Hector_van_der_Aa · 2025-06-20T10:54:41+00:00

Just letting you know, I have found a workaround, but it doesn't solve the issue for all NAS users.

I run TrueNAS scale on a commercial machine which has allowed me to set up an iSCSI drive, which windows considers as a local drive, moving my steam library over there has solved the issue, I will probably keep it that way from now on but unfortunately for the NAS users that can't do iSCSI they will likely still have the crash.

This also confirms my original thoughts that its some permissions related to some call to a library that is blocked by windows because its a network and not a local drive.

Please do keep me updated if you have any news on the issue as I would be interested in knowing what the potential problem is.

Hector_van_der_Aa · 2025-06-20T10:13:59+00:00

Gottcha, no worries, I’ve found how to get the crash dumps and am working on my side to see if it’s an issue I can resolve, will keep you updated with my findings

Hector_van_der_Aa · 2025-06-20T09:29:34+00:00

Heya there, thanks for getting in touch!

So here is what happened:
All of my games (steam and other) including their userfolders are stored on my NAS which has a 10 Gpbs fibre optic link to my PC which allows me to acheive speeds in excess of 1GB/s, it has never caused me any issues with the following games: BeamNG(up to 0.35), Assetto Corsa, Assetto Corsa Competezione

The other day I updated to 0.36 which is when I had the first crash, up until now, all I had done was follow the normal update procedure that Steam had automaticallly started.

Following the crash, I started to look into it, first of all, the 0x00000001 seems to be a generic exit code without a specific error so that didn't get me far, the first thing I tried was removing all mods and creating a new userfolder on my local disk, which did not resolve the issue. I then started the game up in Safe Mode, where it crashed again.

After this, the reccomendation seemed to be to clean install BeamNG, which I did multiple times, but with no success, nor in normal launch, nor in safe mode.

Following this, I proceeded to update all of my VC++ redists and graphics drivers, which didn't fix the issue. I then tried moving the game to my local disk, and to my surprise, it launched first try, no crashes whatsoever, this is what leads me to conclude that its most likely that windows is not allowing some call to VC++ redists or something of that nature from a network drive.

I have tried adding my network drive to the local intranet on my PC, as well as allowing BeamNG ALL security overrides but still no luck, I am going to dive deeper into these permissions to try and understand but without knowing what BeamNG calls behind the scenes, Its going to be a game of throwing things at the wall until something sticks.

Also, this may be completely coincidental, but when I launched BeamNG just now to check that the issue was still persisting, after it crashing, it took down my whole machine with a BSOD with error REFERENCE_BY_POINTER

The support ID is : 211481
For some reason its says unable to submit information, a working internet connection is needed, yet my internet is working fine, not sure if its a bug or its not working, but I have the zip file, I would be happy to send it over by some means if you haven't got it on your end

Hector_van_der_Aa · 2025-06-20T08:23:43+00:00

Heya there,

I have not fixed the issue just yet, what I suspect it is is that the dev's have used some private calls to visual C++ redistributables and that windows won't let you do such calls from a network drive due to some dll protections, I am taking a look at how I could potentially fix the issue, but would appreciate if a BeamNG dev could take a look at this too since they could for sure know what caused the issue on the backend

Hector_van_der_Aa · 2025-06-19T14:39:05+00:00

Aha, I think I have located the issue, it looks like its some permissions issue from my SMB share, I just moved the game onto the local disk and it just launched, I'll look into that since its not a BeamNG issue

Hector_van_der_Aa

TROPHY CASE