3450 shutsoff power in booting process

Is a graphics card installed and if so, what model?

Battery out is a soft BIOS reset.  Granted you'll have to bring back some BIOS items again, for a hard BIOS reset, with unit connected to power and shut off, press and hold power button for 30 sec.

Could be trouble with the IBM dual port card. Specs list Intel Gigabit NIC PCIe card as compatible.  Precision 3450 Small Form Factor Setup and Specifications

Thx for your response.

I went for the hard-reset from the start for no other reason than to be sure.

The IBM card has been in this machine from the beginning.  Has covered several restarts etc without any issues.

No, the is no video card, that slot is free.  There are only two slots in this machine: PCI-e en PCI-e for videao cards.  But I recon (and is my experience) one can use the video slot for any purpose, as long as it is a card that is withing the specs.  And both cards are.

But above all... The same issue occurs even with a fresh installed debian on a SSD and no other disks, nvme, cards and RAM (exept for one 16Gb and it does not matter which I use (I have five compatible DIMMs).  Installing works, but at the first restart from the SSD..  as soon as the volumes are read: system goes of power.

I'm not familiar with Debian, but I do the best I can.  Sounds like you have storage drive(s).  Could one of them be the culprit?

May be lucky running Debian at all?  Not sure.  Not familiar as mentioned.  So I looked up compatible OS.  Precision 3450 Small Form Factor Setup and Specifications

Your Precision 3450 Small Form Factor supports the following operating systems:

Windows 11 Home, 64-bit

Windows 11 Pro, 64-bit

Windows 11 Pro National Academic, 64-bit

Windows 11 Pro for Workstations, 64-bit

Windows 10 Home, 64-bit

Windows 10 Pro, 64-bit

Windows 10 Pro National Academic, 64-bit

RHEL 8.4

Ubuntu Linux 20.04 LTS, 64-bit

It all worked like sunshine for like 6 months running Proxmox (is build on Debian).  No changes done on OS/System level.

I did a shutdown, took it out the cabinet, opend the case, added the one-port-nic, closed the case and start...

And from there it went as described before.

I will try later to install Windows on it (on a SSD, have no other nvme's available) and report back.

Hello,

have you checked the gpu slot for issues ? ( I mean like something extraneous caught by the installed new card and now bridging some contacts ).

@bradthetechnut 

Also with Windows before I get the language choice, .. power off

@mazzinia_ 

Visually seems to be ok.  Good point btw

mmm, what about the F12 bios diagnostics ? did you try them ?

I wonder now if PSU is somehow failing.  Did you already try replacing the size 2032 battery with a new one?  I know you mentioned having it out, but didn't see mention of a new one.  Bad batteries affect BIOS and therefore PC operation.

If PC fails before finishing Windows load, that's not Windows, that could be the battery or PSU.  When I had a bad battery in my 3620, I couldn't even reload Win10.  Which was a shame, cuz before that I was getting BSOD because of the battery.  Then I thought it needed a reload.

@mazzinia_​ I have done all tests in the bios and took nvmes out and disk ssd tests on these (we have a "storage" computer in the office for these kind of things).  All succesfull.

@bradthetechnut​ I see we have no spare's, will buy these later today.  On the PSU, did not think of that, at a point of max volt-need... could be that to...  good suggestion...  But first test with a new cell.  Get back on this.

I didn't have my above post worded quite right, so I edited it.  Instead of ...it's either the battery or PSU," I changed it to "could be the battery or PSU."  I later remembered the possibility of a bad boot drive.  But you said you tested all of your drives.

Amazon (and I'm sure others) have PSU testers.  The catch?  They have the normal 24-pin + 4-pin motherboard connectors.  Precision 3450 has Dell proprietary 6+4+4 pin connectors.  No adapter I know of.  So if we were to rule out the PSU, it would have to be with another Dell OEM PSU.

We'll definitely have to see where it's at after trying a new battery.  The 3450 isn't too terribly old, fairly new yet, but sometimes those batteries only last 2 years (Sony) when it should be 5 (Energizer).

When you tried loading Win10, did you have only 1 drive connected?

New cell did not solve.  Same issues on all boots (Debian and W11).  The tests is with a ssd and a subset of DIMMs that I have available.

I'll have a look for another psu.  Need some more days for that.  Please keep posted

Dell article with more ideas:  Computer Restarts or Shuts Down Intermittently, Locks Up, Stops Responding or an Error Occurs

I've just run into a very similar issue - two Precision 3450s that would power off at what seemed to be the exact same moment of the boot sequence every time. It was at different places depending what OS I was booting, but the same place every time for the same OS.

All BIOS hardware diagnostics passed, same as yours.

I was able to get at least one of the machines booting by going into the "Performance" part of the BIOS settings and disabling everything - single-core only mode, no C states, no turbo boost, no hyperthreading.

I then started turning things on again and it again began powering off during boot. All I know is it's not processor C-states triggering this, because that's as far as I got before I abandoned that line of troubleshooting and on whim tried the BIOS "reload settings" button instead.

I chose "BIOS Defaults", and that may have completely fixed the problem - I now have this machine booting normally with all CPU features enabled, and it seems stable under load, i.e. with something intensive enough to trigger turbo boost. (Note that in Dell BIOSes, "Factory defaults" doesn't appear to do much; you need "BIOS Defaults" to actually clear settings.)

I haven't tried it on the other machine yet; will report back when I have.