I am upgrading the firmware on three of my lab R610 servers, (BIOS from 2.1.15 to 6.4.0,) using the DRM DVD that I built for R610s a few days ago. All of the modules (iDRAC, LifeCycle Controller, PERC H700 RAID controller, SAS HDD FW, Network, Dell Server Administrator, etc.) upgrade fine, and the BIOS appears to, but when I reboot, I always get "BIOS update attempt failed!" just before the the reboot. I tried the alternate method using the USC, but I can't ping the Dell ftp server from inside my company's firewall. I've been reading through the BIOS release notes for the updates that superseded 2.1.15, but I'm not finding anything yet that would indicate that I need to do an interim BIOS FW update to get to 6.4.0:
2.1.15 – 9/13/2010
2.2.10 – 12/6/2010
2.2.11 – 1/6/2011
2.3.12 – 2/1/2011
3.0.0 – 3/23/2011
6.0.7 – 10/4/2011
6.1.0 – 4/22/2012
6.2.3 – 6/26/2012
6.3.0 – 4/22/2013
6.4.0 – 10/9/2013
Perhaps I have an NVRAM setting that is defeating the upgrade?
A few years back, I had a similar problem with half a dozen PE1950s (out of 25), but that turned out to be failed motherboards (flash no longer worked). I don't believe that all three of these more recent enterprise servers went belly-up in exactly the same way. Unfortunately, they're all about a year out of warranty, so I'm on my own, and don't expect Dell support to help me.