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Used Barebones Dell R930 hangs at "Initializing Intel QuickPath Interconnect"
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This is my very first Server project. I am grateful for the chance to learn. I hope that my first post here may be useful to others, but it probably contains more questions than answers:
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I found a great deal online for a used barebones R930 kit. I think it may have included much more than most barebones kits usually do.
The kit was heavily discounted, because it had a damaged and unreadable LCD screen.
I fixed the broken LCD with an inexpensive replacement part designed for R920 and that has worked fine.
Vendor stated that it is only necessary to add CPU and Memory.
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Barebones kit included:
R930 chassis and motherboard
pre-installed H730P RAID Controller with cabling
pre-installed 16+8 HDD backplane with two daughter cards
pre-installed Network Card
pre-installed 4x 1100 Watt Power Supplies with power cords
8 x memory risers
DVD-ROM
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I purchased and installed used 8 x SNPCPC7GC/32G 32GB DDR4 2400MHz ECC RDIMM Memory (supported basis Dell Parts upgrade list for R930)
I also purchased and installed used quad INTEL XEON E7-8890V4 ES PROCESSOR E7-8890 V4 60M Cache 24-core 2.20 GHz (supported basis Dell Parts upgrade list for R930)
I purchased and installed used left-side cabling and right-side cabling for 8x PCIe NVM backplane
I purchased and installed only 1 used Samsung XS1715 1.6TB 2.5" NVMe SSD DELL MZ-WEI1T60
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On startup, I have observed that Dell R930 hangs at "Initializing Intel QuickPath Interconnect".
iDRAC reports that BIOS 1.1.5 is preinstalled.
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I hope that someone will correct me if I am wrong, but I will begin troubleshooting with the assumption that the existing BIOS 1.1.5 cannot support processors above Xeon E7 v3. My assumption is based on a common sense interpretation of release notes for BIOS v2.0.1, which announce new support for Xeon E7 v4 if I am not mistaken.
If my assumption is correct, then it seems that I should upgrade the BIOS to version 2.0.1 in order to support the quad Xeon E7 8890 v4 processors which are currently installed on the R930 motherboard.
Based on my reading of how to upgrade a BIOS, it seems that a system must be able to boot in order to upgrade a BIOS. Is that really true? It would be problematic in my case, because I would need to purchase unwanted Xeon v3 processors just to boot the system, simply to upgrade the BIOS, and then reinstall the desired Xeon v4 processors.
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Any suggestions from the Community would be welcome. Thank you in advance for your time and consideration.
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Dell-JimmyP
311 Posts
1
February 19th, 2018 11:00
Thank you for the service tag.
You are correct, support for the Intel Xeon Processor E7-4800/8800 v4 Product Family Processors was not added until version 2.0.1. An older processor will need to be used to update the BIOS at least to version 2.0.1 which should allow the server to boot.
Thanks,
Dell-JimmyP
311 Posts
0
February 19th, 2018 10:00
Please send a private message with your service tag to ensure we have all appropriate information on your system.
kh_model
9 Posts
0
February 19th, 2018 13:00
Thank you for your prompt and insightful analysis. I have observed that the minimum supported configuration for R930 is dual cpu. For test purposes, I have located a reasonably priced pair of older processors for sale on ebay (2 x Intel Xeon E7-4809v3 CPU). The R930 owners manual states that all E7 v3 family processors are supported. I did not notice any BIOS release notes after version 1.5.1 which suggested anything to the contrary. I hope that I will not purchase an unsupported processor by chosing the E7-4809v3. I suspect that the reason why E7-4809v3 processors are now reasonably priced is because they lack support for Intel Hyper-Threading and Turbo Boost as per the footnotes in the Intel product family spec sheet. Because I will not likely need to keep the test processors, it makes sense to try to reduce my purchase costs. May I assume that with only 1 cpu installed from the Xeon 3 family (an unsupported configuration) it would be possible to upgrade the bios?
Dell-JimmyP
311 Posts
1
February 19th, 2018 14:00
Hi,
You are probably looking at this in the user guide, but on page 25 specifies the processors.
Processor specifications: The PowerEdge R930 system supports two or four Intel E7-8800/4800 v3 or Intel E7-8800/4800 v4 product family processors.
http://topics-cdn.dell.com/pdf/poweredge-r930_owners-manual_en-us.pdf
You'll need a minimum of 2 processors to boot.
Please let me know if that help.
kh_model
9 Posts
0
February 22nd, 2018 19:00
Based on a successful test, I can now confirm that installing dual E7-4809v3 processors has resolved my issue. I can finally see the SETUP screen. I am deeply grateful for the timely and expert advice which has been offered here. Thank you to everyone who took the time to read this post.
kh_model
9 Posts
0
February 24th, 2018 10:00
The issue as described in this post is now fully resolved. In summary, I have upgraded bios to v2.0.1 and then to v2.4.3 while dual E7-4809v3 processors were installed. I then shut down the system, and removed the dual E7-4809v3 processors. Next, I installed quad E7-8890v4 processors. I was able to successfully boot the R930 with a supported bios for the E7-8890v4 processors. Thank you for the excellent and timely support which I have received here.