Boot problem with new Opteron

[moshenko]

Hi,

 

Historically I've purchased Dell workstations for my office, but decided to have another company build some new ones for me this time. We've specified the following:

 

- Asus K8N-DL motherboard;

- 2 x Opteron 265;

- 2GB RAM

- 80GB SATA boot drive;

- 2x250GB SATA RAID 1 storage drives;

- Antec P180 case with 550W PS.

 

The problem I'm having is that the latest workstation refuses to boot. When first delivered it stopped at the "Verifying DMI data..." point in the boot sequence. It was sent back, failed to reproduce the problem, burned in again for a weekend and given back to me displaying the same problem. I sent it back a second time to have a new BIOS chip installed and all looked fine until it was delivered back to me again with the same issue. This machine fails to boot from any device, but will accept a bios update via CD. Does anyone have any ideas where I should start trouble-shooting? I am willing to send it back, and my supplier is willing to continue working on it, but I'm hoping that I can identify something that will allow me to fix it on my own.

 

Thanks

[mtutaj]

how is the memory installed? 2-1 gig chips? I would try to boot with 1-cpu and only a gig of memory, see if you have a problem with one of those. I think you can do that with your motherboard, I'll have to download the manual and take a look.

 

Mike

[manta]

So what you're saying is, that it doesn't work when its in your office, but it works for the other guy when you send it back to him ???

[moshenko]

how is the memory installed? 2-1 gig chips? I would try to boot with 1-cpu and only a gig of memory, see if you have a problem with one of those. I think you can do that with your motherboard, I'll have to download the manual and take a look.

 

Yes, 2 x 1GB chips. I seem to remember reading that I could boot with one CPU, so maybe I'll give that a try.

 

So what you're saying is, that it doesn't work when its in your office, but it works for the other guy when you send it back to him ???

 

Sadly, that is correct. There must be something really simple happening; the machine was burned in successfully twice off-site. I've tried really dumb things like using different power cords, keyboards, mice... nothing.

 

Thanks for the responses.

[moshenko]

Update for anyone that's interested:

 

The problem has been identified, although not really "resolved". It seems that the two-drive RAID 1 array was misbehaving. The drives were connected properly but had somehow lost their RAID definition and were just designated as "available" or something like that. I rebuilt the array and normal booting resumed. I'm still not sure why the array became undefined, so the problem is not really resolved, but at least I know what to look for if something else goes wrong.