Bricked Gigabyte BMC / IPMI Controller

I kind of did a (big) oopsie and tried to upload a BMC firmware image from this motherboard, onto this one. When trying to update in the BMC webinterface the BMC firmware accepted the wrong firmware image, but displayed a failure message some time into the update process.

Now the boot process hangs on “waiting for BMC initialization” most of the time, and only sometimes gets past that.

The motherboard has a “ME RESET” Jumper (with ME most likely not meaning Intel ME, as it is right besides the management controller), and the firmware package comes with “recovery” tools for DOS. But both aren’t documented at all.

Has anyone ever experienced anything like that, or any idea how to fix this?

Have you tried contacting Gigabyte for a solution? Could be an RMA case though.

I didn’t think Gigabyte b2b would bother with me, as that motherboard is quite old, second hand, and i am just a private person.

So i successfully recovered the BMC firmware with the (undocumented) tools in the update package.

I made a bootable Freedos flash drive, and put the update files an tools onto it.

I put the “ME RECOVER” jumper into the non-default position.

Then i used the tool in \244\OTHERS\RECOVERY\SOCFLASH.EXE to flash the new firmware.
That tool expects the location of the firmware (..\..\FW\244.BIN) as the first argument, and a file to back up the current ROM contents into (i just used a copy of the 244.bin.

For Google reference:
GA-6PXSV4 IPMI BMC recovery ROM flash DOS

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That still leaves the numerous problems, that the update didn’t fix:

  • the Webinterface uses TLS1.0 with an expired certificate
  • the Java KVM client only runs when re enableling 3DES_EDE_CBC in the java security settings
  • the keyboard input doesn’t work when running the KVM client on a Linux host

I was in the middle of writing about socflash.

Anyway, just to shed a little more light:

This tool is from the BMC chip vendor itself:


(downloads were disabled but as you already found out the tools are floating on the web)

Asrock supports this way of recovery on their boards: https://www.asrockrack.com/support/faq.asp ( How to update the BMC FW locally in DOS?)

This is really OEM agnostic so should work on most ASPEED based boards - Hence gigabyte boards are also covered.

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