After a week of very patient and tedious work, and thanks to another user who gave me a donor image for a different model, I have been able to determine that the upgrade itself from A32 to A33 corrupted one or more of the security files. The service account password was changed, but the admin account was either not enabled or the password not set. When I figured out which of the security files had been corrupted, I replaced those files from the donor. When I rebooted the ML6000 to A33, it now worked as intended. service password changed, admin account enabled and password set to password. At this point we have upgraded to A35 without issue. Since we were not the first person this type of problem has happened to, it would be decent of Dell to make a generic recovery image available for when the firmware upgrade borks the system. At the very least the upgrade instructions should contain information on how to back up the CF before the upgrade. My advice is to understand Linux and to understand what this command does: sudo dd if=/dev/sdd of=~/Dell-Backup/current version bs=1M count=245      
We are a trade school that received an old decommissioned. ML6000. I was teaching a student how to update firmware on the library and drives. Everything was fine until we applied update A33. This updated changed the default username and password from service & dell4you to something else. We have tried admin / admin, service / secure, admin / password, and anything else we could find to no avail. The frustrating thing is that the release notes for the update say that there is an update to the service password, but that's it, the notes do not tell you what it was changed to. This is very frustrating. We followed the procedures but the upgrade itself has locked us out. There were no other passwords on the system. The only recommendation we can find is to contact Dell and open a ticket, but that seems very unfair to charge us for an issue we didn't cause. Besides, as a non-profit training center, my director is going to tell me to wheel it out to the dumpster rather than pay for service. Does anyone have any ideas? Surely someone has applied this update and ran into the same issue. Thank you in advance.
ml6000 firmware update a33 changes username & password, not documented.