I started the IMPI console, and it showed a BIOS screen on the Recovery page. My cheap USB key didn't have an indicator light, so I released the Ctrl and Home keys after 30 seconds, and shortly after I heard the two beeps that supposedly indicated the BIOS recovery had started. I held the Ctrl and Home keys, then selected 'Power On Server' via the IPMI web view. I didn't hold out any hope that I could hold down two keys on the IPMI virtual keyboard, so I grabbed the USB keyboard from my Mac and plugged it into the server. Then you must press and hold the Ctrl and Home keys during startup, until you see the USB drive light flashing. This evening, I tried SuperMicro's BIOS Recovery procedure, which involves copying the BIOS file onto a USB stick, and naming it 'SUPER.ROM'. I consoled myself with a beer, and went to bed, very frustrated. Needless to say, the machine reset during the BIOS update, and that had the well known effect of turning the server into a brick. I selected 'Set Power Reset' in the IPMI console 'Power Control' menu, and was horrified a few nanoseconds later to see the BIOS update suddenly start churning away again. I pondered whether this was really the end of the BIOS update, and finally decided that it must have finished. ' message, then nothing happened for a long, long time. I watched on the IPMI console as the BIOS update proceeded. Yesterday evening, I finally got over the hump with the BIOS update, as described above.

I'm sure the info I need is buried in this forum somewhere, but my Google-fu isn't strong enough to find it. That is way more than the size of the expanded BIOS zip archives.

How large a USB stick do I need? I've got some ancient 64MB ones that I'd like to use for this, if possible.

I've tried using diskutil partitionDisk /dev/disk3 MBR MS-DOS X10SL7F 0b at the CLI in macOS, but Disk Utility says the resulting USB stick is not bootable. How would I create a bootable USB stick using macOS 10.13? All the info I've found so far assumes you want to use an ISO to make a bootable USB stick, so they point to tools like UNetbootin. Do I need to add an OS such as FreeDOS, or are the contents of the BIOS zip from Supermicro all I need? I've downloaded the 3.0a BIOS for each of these boards, and if I understand the directions correctly, I 'simply' need to copy the contents of the expanded zip files onto a bootable USB stick. I want to update the BIOS on my two servers with Supermicro boards (X10SRH-cF and X10SL7-F).

Macos iso usb