Informing the IBM Community

HMC’s – descriptive errors optional

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I’ve been having great fun recently trying to upgrade one of my HMCs and figure I shall now share with you all the woes in the hope that the next person to have this problem can find the solution a little easier. If you read all the way through there’s also a couple of bits I’m genuinely unsure on and wonder if someone with more experience with IBM knows the answer to.

To fully set the scene, I’m dealing with a 7310-CR3 plugged into a power5 box running V6.1.2 meaning you get the wonderful old Java interface. In the near future it’s going to be plugged into a power7 instead and so I figured lets get with the times and at least bump up to V7.x

For my first trick I thought I’ll try to get it to V6.1.3, although not technically a prequisite as several of the V7 upgrades list “V6.1.3 and earlier” it does no harm to start from a good base.

Off I go to download some ISOs, duly following the instructions helpfully provided by IBM I’ve burned them to disc and tried to run the update. However it keeps giving me a delightful error message when applying the Corrective Service:
Corrupted install image or incorrect time on HMC
Please verify the date/time of the hmc and retry.

Well that’s odd, so to be on the safe side I reset the date/time on the HMC as it was a few minutes out. I also re-downloaded the ISOs and re-burned them but still getting the same error each time.

At this point I decided perhaps I’d be better making the leap to V7, per the IBM website V7.3.5 caught my eye as a relatively short leap that is still “V6.1.3 and earlier” and lists “CR2-CR4” so surely CR3 would be fine.

Since there are some network images I decided to save on more wasted discs I’ll try those, again dutifully downloaded and placed on an FTP server my HMC can access. Upgrade data saved, new files loaded, reboot the HMC…

This time the error states that there’s an unexpected end in the image, after cursing a bit I managed to get the HMC to load back into V6.1.2 and forget about doing the network upgrade. This is probably the point at which I should’ve cut my losses and walked away, but where’s the fun in that?

Instead I downloaded the proper ISOs rather than the network images and again burned to disc, using the recovery media this time I booted into the upgrade/install wizard and selected to upgrade. Away the HMC churns for a bit and then reboots itself, spitting out the first disc which I take as a good sign that we’re making progress.

During boot however:

Authentication Failure. HMC not updated
Corrupted install image or incorrect time on HMC
Please verify the date/time of the hmc and retry
An error has occurred processing the media.
The following conditions may have occurred:

The media in the drive is not valid
The certificate on the media is not valid
An I/O error occurred while processing the media
Media validation error due to incorrect date and time in BIOS

Choose one of the option below:
1 – Retry the operation
2 – Abort the operation

No amount of sticking the disc back in and selecting 1 will gain me co-operation, worse still if I take 2 then the HMC is now unusable as it’s mid upgrade (rebooting again just gets a warning that install has not finished so please insert some media.)

Feeling thoroughly defeated, I load the V6.1.2 recovery media thinking that if I can get back to where I started I’ll call it quits. I’m sure you can guess what happened next, it won’t load V6.1.2 either and comes up with the same message.

“Well it’ll make a nice doorstop at least” I think. Several hours of googling and getting annoyed later and I’m still no further forward, until it suddenly occurs to me “what if CR2-CR4 doesn’t actually include CR3?” A bit of a stretch given V6.1.3 does explicitly list CR3 and that wouldn’t work either, but at this stage I’ll take what I can get.

After downloading V7.7.7 which does explicitly list CR3 I finally find something that will install, perhaps I’m just reading too much into the use of ‘-‘ rather than ‘,’ in the list of supported models? Answers on a postcard below. Either way I think it’s fair to say the error message being offered has very little to do with the solution I’ve concluded?

I’m also not ruling out the possibility that this HMC just hates me by the way, after getting V7 installed I thought I’ll recover my critical data that I did the backup of all the way back at the start. Naturally it’s failed to restore and I’m now in the process of reinstalling V7 again to fix that. If anyone needs me I’ll probably be spending the next couple of days re-building my settings from memory/screenshots.

What’s the opinion from the crowd? Have I found the missing piece of the puzzle or is it pure chance I have a version that’ll work? Should I kick the HMC out the window and get a new one or persevere until I’m done?

 

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