Dell poweredge t420 not booting

Question

Hi i have managed to get a dell poweredge t420 that i had to put in 2 x cpu's, perc controller, 32gb ram, system board battery and a small hard drive for testing, there is no operating system as yet as i cant get into the settings to access the bios, idrac etc after the splash screen ?

Once i switch on the server it seems to go through the motions and gets to the splash screen where you can select the settings for F2, F10, F11 and F12, i have tried all of these options numerous of times but the screen just goes blue on the monitor, and on the server itself it seems ok displaying the service tag number with blue background.

The issue as stated above i cant get into the server settings, so asking if anyone has a workaround for this.

DELL-Shine K · Answer

Can you try to boot the server with minimum component to boot(One CPU, One DIMM on slot A1 and one PSU). Details on minimum to boot and other troubleshooting steps are available in below link.

andiewill · Answer

Update .....after trying all different things i took out everything ram, perc, keyboard etc and booted it up, turned it off and put the perc, and one stick of ram in the second cpu slot in all different combinations and nada.

Turned it off off and it was different don't ask what ? switched it back on again and it went through the motions and nothing, out of frustration i decided to press random keys on the top of the keyboard and the resolution changed and started to show much more info on the monitor to my shock, and the resolution also went back to default hd, now i can access the bios.

not sure what that is all about but for now i'm going to try and update the bios etc, but i'm thinking the monitor switching or not switching to the correct resolution maybe the issue for it to be picked up in the first instance.

But for now i know it should work if it goes wrong again.

Also this comment below from another user makes sense....

Glad to hear you're making progress!!!

I have noticed that the 12th Gen Dell severs can use some good old VGA frequencies that modern LCD monitors struggle with.

Also worth knowing is that iDRAC comes with a static IP address that's 192.168.0.120 in case you don't see it being assigned via DHCP.

DELL-Shine K · Answer

If you have Enterprise license on iDRAC you can access iDRAC and see the console. You can use LCD panel to view and configure IP address on iDRAC

PowerEdge Hardware General

Dell poweredge t420 not booting

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