Dell Poweredge Server won't boot after Shipping
Posted on Jan 29, 2009 by
Paul White
If you have ever run into the problem of buying or selling something on
ebay, only to have it not work once it reaches it destination, you know
the kind stress this creates. Basically the Dell Poweredge 1750 Server
I had was not booting up, and would
flash an orange / amber light on
the front. After spending countless hours googling for answers the solution that finally solved it was relatively simple.
Before I give you all my solution, let me explain in detail what my problem was.
The Hardware:
Dell Poweredge 1750 Server with Duel 2.8 Xeons, and 2 GB RAM, Duel Power Supplies, and 2 x 146 GB 10K SCSI drives running on a Perc 4 DI
raid card.
The Problem:
Unit would power up, as the fans ( loudest things to ever come out of dell ) would spin up, annoying both me and my dog ( who quickly left the room ). DVD ROM would not respond and open. Display would not come up. Basically the unit would not POST on boot up.
The Solution:
Remove the following.
Hard drives, Memory, CPUs ( both if its a duel system ), power supplies, bios battery,
RAID card battery. Unplug power cords ( should have been done before the previous ). Let it sit there for a few minutes. Then reinstall everything. Now there is something very important you should realize. The CPUs are most likely going to seem somewhat attached to the Cooling Blocks. You must remove the cooling blocks from the CPUs. This might take some force, but they will seperate. then notice on the mother board how the CPU sockets have a little bar nest to them. you need to move this bar over so you can reseat the CPUs. Then after you have reseated the CPUs you can reingage the bar locking the CPU's in their sockets. Then put the heat sinks back on the CPUs and strap them down with their tension bars. The memory also requires a good amount of preasure to install. Make sure the side locks can go in their groves the way they are supposed to.
Upon powering the system back on, everything worked great, with the exception of my OS. Since I cleared BIOS. I had lost my original settings. Not a big deal, as I just had to reset the clock, and then enable the
RAID controller. Once I did this
Windows Server 2008 booted right up.
What I learned:
First of all if you are shipping a rack server across the country, be sure to add extra padding. Give it a good 6-9 inches on all sides. I used bubble wrap to ship mine, and UPS practically destroyed it. If it doesn't work when it arrives, check all the connections. Reseat everything. The last thing I learned was SCSI drives and Dell Servers can take a beating from UPS, and still get the job done.
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