Supermicro NICs gone after BIOS update

Welcome to Supermicro, where the docs are inconsistent and often wrong. What I typically end up doing is digging around on ftp://ftp.supermicro.com until I find something that seems useful.

In your case, I'd suggest you check for upgrades to the actual BIOS before you try anything else. The IPMI BIOS and the real BIOS appear to be closely linked, and upgrading the real one may help.

From there, I'd suggest you take a look at the tools in ftp://ftp.supermicro.com/utility/ , one of them will probably work for you, even though none explicitly claim to support your motherboard. The 'IPMI FW flash tools' directory is probably where I'd start.

I should note that it's possible to brick the motherboard or IPMI controller by using the wrong firmware flash tool. The only people that can tell you which tool is actually correct is Supermicro themselves.

I finally got some answers from their tech support, though it didn't end up working and it honestly sounded more like "suggestions" than actual facts... regardless:

• The five beeps likely means "process failure" in this case - whatever that means.
• The three beeps could possibly mean RAM failure. I strongly doubt this as I let the RAM burn in with memtest+ for about 72 hours. Doesn't mean something isn't wrong - just doubtful.
• For what it is worth, I was told that the format of the flash drive didn't matter between FAT12, FAT16 and FAT32 - I tried both FAT16 and FAT32 without success.
• I was told that the name of the file is case sensitive, and should be SUPER.ROM in all caps.
• I was also told that any known good BIOS image could be used as a source, just renamed to SUPER.ROM

I hope this helps someone else in the future. After about six weeks of emailing back and forth with their tech support and attempting different things with this board - I finally gave up troubleshooting it and just sent it in for an RMA and purchased a different board. Anyone want to buy a refurbished Supermicro board?