R430 server hangs and then reboots during boot

Question

A R630 we have has been in continuous use for over 3 years since it was purchased new in October 2016 but had to be powered down last week owing to electrical power installation work being carried out in the server room. When it was powered back on, up popped a message about the BIOS battery being low or missing & to press F1 to continue. So I powered off and replaced the battery but now the system will hang a few seconds into the boot, wait for about 30 seconds before the screen goes blank and it reboots from cold with the 'Configuring memory...' message and the cycle repeats.

It makes no difference whether I boot from local disk or a USB pen drive and the problem persists with different Linuxes and FreeBSD. I've reset the BIOS to defaults, checked the H330 RAID controller settings (we're using 4 disks in JBOD on this server) updated all the firmware (BIOS, LCC, iDRAC, onboard Broadcom gigabit NICs and the dual Intel X520 10 GB NIC PCie card and the mini-H330). UEFI hardware diagnostics all pass OK including the 256 GB of memory. On Linux, the issue occurs about 5 seconds into the boot with the console hanging after the ACPI probing while with FreeBSD, the hang occurs slightly later with a console message stating 'the first hard disk on the RAID controller is not certified'.

Am I missing something? We've had no problems with this system until now and has been powered on continuously although rebooted for routine O/S & software upgrades 4 or 5 times.

DELL-Josh Cr · Accepted Answer

Hi, I would try taking it down to minimum to post and see if you still have the issue. Page 106 https://dell.to/2SXgdYd

andyt22imp · Answer

Thanks for the suggestion - it worked! I removed the PCIe expansion card cage and took out the dual port X520 10 Gbit/sec network adapter (Dell P/N 0942V6), put the empty cage back and the system booted straight away. Removed the cage, put the card back and it still booted right away.

I have a feeling that since I had to remove this cage to replace the CR2032 coin cell on the mainboard underneath, it's possible one of the two PCIe risers wasn't making proper contact with the slot on the mainboard when I refitted it. This was despite the fact that both the LCC and the firmware update utility correctly detected the presence of the X520 card while I had the boot problem. I'll probably never know what the cause of the problem actually was but this server is now back in service and that's the main thing.

Thank you for putting me on the right track!

Andy

Rack Servers

R430 server hangs and then reboots during boot

Was this post helpful?