This is certainly a poor design, as you can read many seasoned admins who have updated their iDRAC only to have it killed. One possible cause is not by doing all the incremental updates, doing updates from an old iDRAC to one many revisions newer is a sure way to kill things, but even then there is no guarantee based on the amount of failures.
List of threads of people's dead iDRAC's:........
I've got one of these for testing projects from work at home and got more than I bargained for with the time I've spent on it due to the storage handing/Perc 6/i cards.
My particular model came with the following:
2U Rack Mount Server with Rails
2xOpteron 2373 EE (Quad Core, there is a 6-core version that can be found at times)
16GB RAM
2 x 250GB Seagate SATA
2 x Dell Perc 6/i (horrible and a nightmare to work........
One thing to remember is that you need MegaCli to do the flashing.
You also need the correct file,I tried at least 2 different Perc 6 firmwares from Dell that kept getting rejected as corrupt by MegaCli(they were really the wrong version). I have an external PCI-E Dell 6 Perc/I butI chose images from the 'Integrated" on motherboard version as it was allI could find. They are different, and below is my first time finding success.........
I flashed an LSI Logic firmware to it and it broke the BIOS (cannot do Ctrl+R) for booting purposes but allows other functionality to work normally.
I tried downgrading to a Dell firmware for Perc 6i but it won't work, not even with MegaCli
wget http://downloads.dell.com/FOLDER00416606M/1/SAS-RAID_Firmware_W83M2_LN32_6.3.1-0003_A14.BIN
--2013-08-26 12:53:39-- http://downloads.dell.com/FOLDER00416606M/1/SAS-RAID_Firmware_W83M2_LN32_6.3.1-0003_A14.BIN
Resolvi........