Found the problem. Turns out my servers are OEM and had custom BIOS images installed. I found a post with a reference to a "/forcetype" switch when running the updater utility. Created a bootable DOS USB drive with the utility in it and ran the exe with the "/forcetype" switch.  Clean upgrade to v1.14.0.   
I have a pair of R310's both are BIOS v1.5 and v1.6. The support site has downloads for v.1.12 - v.1.14 which is the latest published.  I have tried to flash the oldest available BIOS but it fails because it things it's not an R310 and it does not allow me to proceed.  Is there a place where I can find older BIOS versions to do an intermediate update, or is there a command line option that will force the BIOS update? Thanks and regards,
R310 BIOS Update Fails