OK If you’re a hardware designer, or embedded systems engineer/designer, make sure when you design your flash process to be customer recoverable. Bad flash’s happen. Also, blade manufacturers, other activity on the management module, shouldn’t interrupt a flash process. Looks like I’ll be returning an Intel SBXD132 due to a fragged SMP (System Management Processor — Embedded management module) that had a failure to flash.

It’s just silly these days to not include the little bit of extra flash so it can come up in *some* mode that the customer can get firmware onto it. Obviously it won’t save you from a bad boot loader, which can happen occasionally, but it’ll provide something.

PC BIOS learned this lesson, most BIOS have an alternate page they can load the BIOS from *or* enough brains to load an image out of floppy. It might require opening the case and changing a jumper or flipping a DIP switch but that beats returning it to the manufacturer.

This is effectively part two of blades, but not the sharp kind.