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34998
April 6th, 2013 14:00
Poweredge 2970 Series No Boot
Poweredge 2970 Series,
Will not boot, not even to BIOs, No Warnings, No Errors, Blue LED on back, DRAC says powered on but No Video, No Power to USB devices, HDD not spinning up, Fans full then settle to low speed, CD drive does get activity then goes away.
Tried reseating the processors, tried reseating everything, new HDDs, new CD drive, reset BIOS by removing battery fro 10+ minutes.
Figured a bad Video GPU? Tried putting a PCIE video card in, no luck.
Its like it is hanging on something at boot time but I am unable to see what.
No Events found!
dmeagle01
2 Posts
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April 6th, 2013 15:00
theflash1932
11 Legend
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16.3K Posts
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April 6th, 2013 15:00
Remove everything that is not necessary - remove drives, all expansion cards (including the RAID controller), all but one stick of memory in the first slot, and optical/floppy drives. Try a single processor in slot 1, swapping if it still doesn't work. Clearing the NVRAM can be done via the jumpers on the motherboard - a better alternative to removing the battery.
Also, be sure to reseat the expansion riser cards as well.
theflash1932
11 Legend
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16.3K Posts
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April 6th, 2013 17:00
Nope.
mai42356
2 Posts
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February 4th, 2014 16:00
OK so, earlier today I removed all the unnecessary components ( hard drives, cd, drac, one proc and one bank of memory, cmos battery and raid battery)on one server, in order to eliminate the possible culprits preventing the POST process. I was able to reacquire the POST on one server with only one processor installed and two gigs on memory in that processors memory loop. Also noteworthy is the fact the cmos battery also needs to be removed during this re-initialization procedure in order to succeed.
Careful troubleshooting determined that reseating the memory with the power disconnected and drained allowed for the POST process to occur one time. Although the servers could be restarted on the fly over and over, each subsequent “shutdown” necessitated a repeat of this memory reseat routine to reacquire the POST function again. Also I noted that initially (the first time going through this process) also required the processor be reseated as well (with cmos battery removed). However subsequently the processor did not need to be reseated, only the DIM cards. At this point I had a method by which I could POST the server and look for boot media to continue troubleshooting.
Although I used different methods on different 2970 chassis of updating during the original attempt to prepare them for the repurposing (USB boot, Repository CD, even used the windows executable on one server that had an OS installed), the one common denominator for all the servers that were failing was the BIOS updates. So I attempted to reinstall 4.2.1 and that did not change the status quo , still no POST without manipulating the memory modules and power supply. Next I retrograded the BIOS with version 2.02 and this cleared up the problem completely. Finally I updated the BIOS with version 3.03 and the system remained stable. I am stopping here. I have tested two servers now with all other firmwares up to date in the chassis and have seen no noticeable issues. That would be the following firmwares:
BIOS 3.0.3
DRAC 1.65
BMC 2.50
Broadcom boot agent 4.4.4
PERC 5i 5.2.2-0072