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December 18th, 2020 09:00
Dell T420 Server Fails to Boot When Network Cables are Attached
I know this is weird. I have done all my troubleshooting and determined that only when the network cables are removed from the onboard and PCI NIC cards will the system boot properly. Both cards have Broadcom 1Gbe NICs.
The iDRAC7 Enterprise NIC DOESN'T effect the boot process as found in my troubleshooting and after POST, I can plug the cables in with no issues and it will work normally/as expected.
I have updated all drivers using the All in one ISO from Dell, reset BIOS/UEFI, reset iDRAC, reset LCC all to no avail. It will either hang on the "Initializing Firmware Interfaces..." screen OR will give me an EFI error screen that had me going down a completely different road.
The cables are Known Good and will even work perfectly fine after the system boots (unplug, boot, plug back in, wait, done). But this is not something which will work for me if I loose power or something like that. Is there any fix for this or any way to disable the NICs until the OS loads or at least past UEFI POST/Firmware Initialization?
DELL-Joey C
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December 20th, 2020 17:00
Hello,
Am I getting it right, even if you connect the cables on the PCI NIC cards only, the system won't boot either?
You were mentioning on Initializing firmware Interfaces error, what stage was it before the error prompts, after RAID controller, or after iDRAC initialization?
Could you get a screenshot of the errors that you faced?
Have you tried checking in boot menu if hard disk is the first boot?
Does iDRAC hardware logs show any errors?
You can disable the network controllers, in BIOS. But I don't think you can enable it back without accessing to BIOS.
Could you try removing the PCI NIC and just test the onboard NIC.