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19446

February 12th, 2014 12:00

Dell Optiplex 755 no display

My boss recently picked up a lot of 8 Dell Optiplex 755 PCs.  (Ultra small form factor model)
Only thing we know about these machines is that they were working a few months prior, and at that time, the drives were wiped.

The fans, hard drive, CD drive, etc all spin up when you press the power button, but there's no video output.  Tried a DVI screen (that was working with an Optiplex previously) and several VGA monitors through an adapter.  Every display goes into power saving mode, as if nothing is connected to it.

Tore one down the mainboard, nothing looks missing or out of order, all the capacitors are fine as well.  Also tried different power supplies.
Checked the diagnostic lights, they cycle between a few patterns before settling on 1 2 3 = GREEN 4 = OFF.  I looked up this code, but it's a generic "check drive connections" error.  The machine also makes two short beeps when attempting to start.  This beep code is not in the list.

What has me stumped is that all 8 machines do the same exact thing.  All I can think of is some fluke hardware failure, where all the mainboards or power supplies died in storage?

Any ideas?

25 Posts

February 12th, 2014 15:00

Hi Nick_56

Is the power button lit up, and if it is what color is it? Is it flashing or solid?

If all the drives were wiped and now don't work then I would try clearing NVRAM by pulling the CMOS battery / Coin cell battery. This will clear the BIOS settings from before the drive was wiped. 

Also how were the drives wiped? 

6 Operator

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14.4K Posts

February 12th, 2014 15:00

How long have these system been in storage? It could be as simple as replacing the CMOS battery on the mother board. I would suggest you try at least one. The battery is a common CR2032 battery that is readily available.

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