Dell T320 not completing boot

Question

Hello everyone!

Recently I was gifted an old Dell PowerEdge T320 from a business. I am running into some issues that are making it impossible to set it up. I will run through it and I appreciate any help in advance.

When I went to pick it up I brought a windows 10 EFI usb to see if it could even be booted because it hadn't been used in some time. It was able to boot perfectly fine to the usb and started windows setup. I went ahead and cancelled that and shut it down then took it home. When I got home I took the drives out and wiped then formatted them just for the sake of that individuals data privacy. When I put them back in alongside a new SSD that would be the boot drive. Now it will not boot in any way shape or form no matter what I try. It will get to the screen where it shows the dell logo and the loading bar alongside the options in the top right hand corner but it doesn't actually do anything when the options are selected. Regardless of whether I try to select system setup, lifecycle settings, or boot order the bar fills (system loads) then the entire machine goes to sleep. Sometimes it will come back up shortly after and show its initializing the interfaces but it always ends up going back to sleep.

I would really love to get some use out of this machine and it started the windows 10 setup the first time I used it but seems to be unusable now. Really hoping someone can point me in the right direction.

Thanks!

Ian

DELL-Young E · Answer

Hello thanks for choosing Dell. When I went to pick it up I brought a windows 10 EFI usb -> Win10 isn’t a server OS. Then it probably can’t recognize things like PERC/ server controller and such.

iandrice · Answer

Hi!

I really only brought the windows 10 usb because I had it premade already and just wanted to on a basic level wipe and format the drives....fortunately the windows installer does so!

Regardless of whether or not I want to use windows 10, it won't recognize anything or even go to the BIOS menu.

DELL-Chris H · Answer

Landrice,

If the server isn't making the BIOS then you may want to consider taking it to its minimum to post configuration, to see if something came loose in transit. Minimum to post is removing everything from the server internally and externally but the following;

System Board
CPU1 with heat sink (minimum for troubleshooting)
Single DIMM configuration with DIMM in socket A1
Control Panel with cable (to power system on)
PSU (and for redundant PSU also the PDB/PIB)

After you take the server to its minimum to post then try powering up, if the server starts then you will want to power back down and individually reinstall the removed devices until the issue reappears or all the devices are reinstalled. This will help to isolate which device is causing the issue. Now if you take the server to its minimum to post and it doesn't start then try reseating everything listed above, if that still doesn't resolve it then there is an issue with one or more of the devices listed above.

Let us know what you see.

PowerEdge Hardware General

Dell T320 not completing boot

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