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:........

If you remove the white label on the chip (near the CMOS battery) you will find the following details about it: SST 49LF080A 33-4C-NHE It is the PLCC32 type and can be pried and removed safely (but be very careful) with an eye glass flat head screw driver. If you just have a bad flash you may be able to reprogram your original or just buy another one with the part# above and reprogram it. This is great news for people who have bricked th........