PowerEdge 2650 Booting Problem

Question

Good afternoon,

I just received a donated Dell PowerEdge 2650 and I am trying to install an operating system on it, and I am having a good bit of bad luck.

I have tried to install VMware ESX 3.5, FreeNAS 8.0.4, and Ubuntu 10.04. All of the installs complete without any problems. When I reboot the server, I get the error "No boot device available - strike F1 to retry boot, F2 for setup utility". I am not sure what the problem is or how to fix it.

Thank you,

Mike Di Domenico

mightymouse3062 · Answer

The LCD panel is blue. I have RAID enabled. It is setup with 2 disks. The first disk is a single drive and the other is 3 disks in a RAID 5 config. Thanks again, Mike

theflash1932 · Answer

Is the LCD panel amber or blue?  If amber, what is the message(s) that is scrolling?  Do you have RAID enabled?  How many disks?  What RAID level?

mightymouse3062 · Answer

Does anyone have any ideas or where I could go to find the answer? Thank you, Mike

mightymouse3062 · Answer

I let the background initialization complete before installing (I gave it a good 24 hours)

I formatted all of the drives before starting this project... again I gave it 24 hours.

They are Dell drives

I kept everything default when installing.

theflash1932 · Answer

Did you let the background initialization complete before installing?  You don't normally need to, but occasionally it is required.  Also, were the disks specially formatted before being used in this project?  Are they Dell drives?  When you installed these OS's, did you change the default boot options and/or GRUB?  I have had ESXi and various versions of Ubuntu (although I am NOT a big linux guy - just the basics) running on a 2650 without the problems you describe.

theflash1932 · Answer

Have you tested the drives? How did you format the drives - using a third-party utility or during installation of the OS? To be honest, I am grasping at straws here, as I can think of no other reason why it should do this.

- Occasionally, if the drives are formatted with a third-party utility, they do not work properly; likewise, sometimes a third-party utility is needed to format first ... the reason why is unknown (to me).

- Non-Dell drives (non-certified with Dell firmware for that controller) have been known not to work on occasion, particularly drives coming out of non-mainstream servers that may also have been formatted using a special filesystem or alters the boot sector of the drive.

- Waiting for initialization to complete is not usually necessary, but for some reason - probably outdated firmware or method of installation - initialization needs to complete before it can be successfully installed (particularly if simply filling up the disk from a backup, for example).

Obviously, because of your answers, these are not the case, but are general causes of similar issues.

theflash1932 · Answer

This will create a bootable diagnostics CD: www.dell.com/.../DriverDetails

mightymouse3062 · Answer

I have not tested the drives, how would I do that?

I formatted the drives with the built in RAID utility, before I installed the OS. Then when I installed the OS it was formatted to the default for the OS.

I have never heard of a problem like this before, only thing I can think of is I have a bad drive or controller.

Thanks for your help,

Mike

PowerEdge Hardware General

PowerEdge 2650 Booting Problem

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