I spent a lot of time trying to figure out the best way to upgrade the BIOS on a Dell Poweredge 650. I had multiple problems because I didn’t have a floppy drive to use at first and the fact that the PE650 is an older Dell server model. Since I didn’t have a floppy drive to test with initially I attempted to use the Dell System Build & Update Utility however I was unable to ever get it working properly. Initially the problem was simply getting the tool downloaded. Finally I decided to order a floppy drive and below are instructions to upgrade the PE650 using a floppy disk.

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Last night I was working on upgrading the BIOS on an older Dell Poweredge 650 that I have been using as a PostgreSQL development server. One of the CD’s I needed to create is downloaded from Dell as two parts of an ISO file that needed to be combined so below is information on how to combine the files using the Windows copy command.

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One thing that can be annoying on Dell servers is the long boot process though you can modify the BIOS and other items to make the boot process faster. One of this first things I always do is disable the PXE boot delay by making a modification to the BIOS and by modifying the settings of the Intel Boot Agent. A better view and description of the PXE boot delay on a Dell Poweredge 650 is displayed below as well as both of the modifications used to minimize the delay of the PXE Intel Boot Agent.

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