R620 Fans Running at Full Speed - No errors or reason why in OpenManage

Question

I purchased five R620 servers from dellrefurbished.com. Two of them are working perfectly and three of them are booting up and running all of the fans at full speed (~16000 RPM). It is very strange to me that three out of five servers are doing the identical thing and none of them show an error in OpenManage.

I have done a fair amount of troubleshooting on this issue.

I used the bootable ISO from the Dell support site for R620s to update ALL firmware in this server after I manually updated the Lifecycle controller first.
I reset the BIOS to factory defaults.
I tried a variety of System Profile settings including disabling C1.
I drained the flea power on the servers with the power cords disconnected.
I left one server unplugged for 24 hours.
I installed OpenManage to see if it thought the chassis was open but that doesn't seem to be the case either. I see entries in the Hardware Log when I open and close the chassis so it seems to be sensing that properly. There is nothing else that I see in OpenManage to indicate why this is happening. Screenshots attached.
I removed some RAM from one of the servers to force it to re-profile the memory and system performance

Nothing has produced a positive result. EVERY time I boot these servers immediately following the memory test at POST the fans spin up to full speed and nothing I do gets them to stop.

These servers are just out of their initial 3 year warranty so I can't contact Dell support. The dellrefurbished.com website says that they offer a 100 day warranty on their site and refer to it as the "Legendary Dell 100 day limited warranty". When I called them for support they suggested that I return the servers for credit or post on this forum after asking some routine support questions. I'm not sure I would agree that this is "Legendary" support.

I have already committed to delivering these servers to clients and I would really like to get them working without returning them to dellrefurbished.com for credit. Is my only option to pay Dell to reinstate the warranty? Has anyone else encountered this same issue and know why it is happening?

I saw a couple of other forum posts after doing a search on google and it looks like they all ended up getting the motherboard replaced.

The site that I purchased these servers from says that the Dell computers are "Refurbished to Dell Specifications". Either they didn't actually test them or something weird is going on here. Otherwise three recently refurbished servers wouldn't all be doing EXACTLY the same thing.

Thanks in advance for any assistance.

Daniel My · Answer

Hello

The fans are controlled by the iDRAC. The iDRAC sets fans speeds based on installed hardware, ambient temperature, and other thermal probes.

I suggest checking the temperature probes to see if they are reading correctly. Also, remove or disconnect any hardware you have added. If you have installed unsupported hardware it can create odd behavior in the system.

If there are no issues with the temperature sensors and the issue persists at minimum-to-POST then the system board will likely need to be replaced. The iDRAC/BMC is built into the system board.

Thanks

qlafferty · Answer

All of the temperatures look good and there is no additional hardware in these servers at the moment. At first there was a Solarflare 10Gb NIC, but I removed that during troubleshooting.

I just can't understand how 3 out of 5 systems that I just bought are doing exactly the same thing.

Do you know if this is a very common failure on these servers? Is it unsurprising that this has happened to three of these servers that I just got?

Daniel My · Answer

Do you know if this is a very common failure on these servers?

High fan speeds within a system are usually not issues. It is usually the system working as designed. In the rare occurrence that a hardware fault is found to cause fans to run at high speeds it is typically caused by a faulty intrusion sensor or temperature probe.

Is it unsurprising that this has happened to three of these servers that I just got?

Not since the systems were purchased refurbished. Many issues either go unnoticed during testing or cannot be reproduced outside of production. High fan speeds that do not produce errors would not likely be caught in testing these systems.

Systems are usually returned and purchased in batches. It is likely that the three systems you are experiencing issues with were returned by the same person. For the same hardware issue to occur on three systems suggests that the same thing happened to each of them.

Thanks

juaness · Answer

Hello Daniel

I have the same problem, 100% fans without errors.

Is this a problem if they are allowed to run 100%?

Is there a risk of burning or damaging the fans by running at 100% speed?

Thank you

JuanE

PowerEdge Hardware General

R620 Fans Running at Full Speed - No errors or reason why in OpenManage

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