2850 Will Not Boot, Not Even BIOS

Try:

Try booting up with NO drives in.

Clearing NVRAM using jumpers on the motherboard near the system memory.

Reseating backplane (silver release lever with blue sticker running the width of the system toward the front) and the Riser card (running nearly the full length of the server in the rear/left with blue release lever).

Reseat processors - best to remove #2, powering up with only #1, swapping if it still doesn't work.

Are you getting any text on the screen - Dell logo, memory test, processors, F2 to enter BIOS, etc.?

Hi there,

Tried with no drives, still no POST or output to VGA, i get Zero text on screen, monitor just goes to sleep and have tried a seperate monitor.

Will try your other suggestions, many thanks for your help.

Not if the board got damaged - particularly the video circuitry.

Just to make sure of one thing ... when you removed the processor(s), was the processor attached to the heatsink?  Did you separate them before reinserting the processor?  I only ask because it is a VERY common mistake not to.

Hi

Thanks for that, tried the NVRAM Jumpers and re-seating all the RAM, Backplane and Riser.

Also tried the CPU removal and still nothing.

Pretty much defunct i guess, i would have thought even a pretty toasted server would still boot to the bios.

Thanks,

Paul

Removing processors is the last thing you want to try, but it is most often the fix for "fixable" no video issues on the 2800/2850 servers.

Yeah i actually found it difficult to re-seat them, so i seperated them from the HS then pushed the heat sink back on making sure it was well contacted.  I have tried the font/rear video port but nothing, will have a closer look to see if there are any dry joints.

Many people simply try to seat the processor into the slot while it is attached to the heatsink, but it is impossible to do so while attached, as the the processor cannot be properly seated without the lever on the slot.  You did right to separate them.