Blinking cursor when booting a poweredge 1850

Question

I have a dell poweredge 1850. I booted one time and it booted fine. Then I powered it off by pressing the power button on side. Pressed the power button again and then when it boots, it displays the following information:

Dell Systems PowerEdge 1850

www.dell.com

Memory mirroring enabled

two 3.20 ghz processors, processor bus: 800 mhz, l2 cache: 1mb

and then it gives me a blinking cursor. And it just remains as a blinking cursor.

What can I do?

DELL-Josh Cr · Accepted Answer

Press F2 and make sure that the OS install mode is disabled. That will limit the memory to 256MB. If that works add a 2nd stick back in.

DELL-Josh Cr · Answer

It is probably attempting to load the PERC controller next, but it could be another PCI card. Try to reseat any PCI cards in the system and see if it will boot. You may also want to try and reseat the riser itself

ftp://ftp.dell.com/Manuals/all-products/esuprt_ser_stor_net/esuprt_poweredge/poweredge-1850_User%27s%20Guide7_en-us.pdf

If that does not work, try to boot with a single memory stick in the system.

johnmerlinos · Answer

I tried booting with a single memory stick. I removed 3 memory sticks and left one. And now it makes a beeping noise when I try to boot.

DELL-Josh Cr · Answer

What is the beep code that it is giving?

johnmerlinos · Answer

Thanks for response. I looked at documentation and the error was due to "No memory modules installed in the first memory module connector". So when I fixed that issue, I booted up again and now it gets to this part:

"Amount of available memory is limited to 256 mb" Strike the F1 key to continue, F2 to run setup utility.

And then it just gives me a blinking cursor and that's it.

Does this mean it could still be a PCI card issue? Or is this most likely bad RAM issue?

PowerEdge Hardware General

Blinking cursor when booting a poweredge 1850

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