First off, BIG shout out to Derek at KACE support.  He helped us get through the upgrade process for this.

Our K1200 appliance is an older style, KACE-built rack server (built by KACE prior to the Dell acquisition).  To give you an idea of its age, it still had a CD-ROM drive in it...

We ran into some issues that baffled even some folks with KACE support a couple of months back, so the determination was made to reimage our K1200 box from scratch.  After performing the requisite backups, we went down the road of reimaging our K1200.

According to support,we had to image to the earliest main revision and step through the updates.  This meant getting an ISO for 5.0.25766, running the reimage from this disc, and then stepping through each major update:

kbox_upgrade_server_5.1.31237

k1000_server_5.2.38773

k1000_server_5.3.47927

k1000_server_5.3.53053

(Fun fact: since the ISO was 1.5GB, and we only had the aforementioned CD drive in the chassis, we had to opt for an external drive...)

We attempted to reimage the box with the 5.0.25766 ISO, but (much like Windows Server 2003 installations on RAID arrays), the drivers for the RAID controller on this older K1200 device were not present!  That meant it didn't see the array during the reimage, and it failed.

Derek sent us an earlier ISO (4.0.12580), and that actually had the drivers for the RAID controller, and the reimage began.  We then began the road to updating this device to the current version, and had to traverse through:

kbox_upgrade_server_4.2.18263

kbox_upgrade_server_4.3.20109

kbox_upgrade_server_4.3.22167

...and then begin the upgrade path for the 5.x versions noted earlier.

All was going well until we got to 5.2.38773, and then the upgrades would no longer take.  Derek came through again, and sent us a really tiny (16KB!) patch, called "kbox_patch_5.2.38773_Consolidated_20110310.kbin".  This installed fairly quickly, and the remaining updates went through on the very next try!

In any case, this was all rather wacky, so I thought it best to share in KACE (ahem) someone else runs into this.

Cheers,

Tim