Dell R720 just died...

[tiernano]

Morning all.

I have a Dell R720 I got from my office decommissioning stuff a few months back, and tried plugging it in and turning it on a few days ago. The first thing I noticed was one of the PSUs just clicks when it gets plugged in, but the second one works properly... So, it started up and I connected to it over IPMI (no VGA monitors available now... hope to get one soon). Long story short, it allowed me in via the web interface and I was looking around, throwing commands at it, and the like, and got the HTML5 Remote control up and running. It's been a while since I used this, so I was going around different menus to try to reset the disks from the way they were originally setup (this is going to be running ProxMox with ZFS) but couldn't figure it out, so rebooted, thinking it might be a different interface... screen went green (no signal) and nothing... I tried refreshing the page, and nothing... checked the port on the IPMI and no lights... just dead... no lights on the IDRAC card, LCD is dead... PSU has a green light on it, but nothing else...

Any ideas of what is going on? Any ideas of what I need to do to reset it? It just went from running to dead after a reboot...

Thanks.

 

[Dev_Mgr]

I'd suggest to start with removing both powersupplies, and then insert only the "good" one. The powersupply should light up when plugged in (don't even have to power up the server).

Dell PowerEdge R720 and R720xd Owner's Manual | Dell US

If neither powersupply will even light up, it's likely that both powersupplies are no good (though there is a tiny chance of it being the powercables or power distribution board (though I'm not sure if this Dell has one, or if it would prevent the diagnostic light on the PSUs to not light up).

 

[tiernano]

So, I disconnected both PSUs and only plugged in the good one. The PSU lights up green, but there are still no lights on the iDRAC. No noise, no post, no nothing...

Are there any other options? Can you restart the iDRAC or force a BIOS or Firmware reset, and if so, how?

Thanks.

 

[Terry Kennedy]

So, I disconnected both PSUs and only plugged in the good one. The PSU lights up green, but there are still no lights on the iDRAC. No noise, no post, no nothing...

Are there any other options? Can you restart the iDRAC or force a BIOS or Firmware reset, and if so, how?

I'm pretty sure that the iDRAC on an x20 will still power-up and get link even if the main chassis power is off (that's the only way you could remotely power servers off / on).

You probably have a bad power supply. Or there's enough installed in the system that instead of operating in redundant / load-sharing mode, it actually needs two power supplies to run.

 

[tiernano]

it did work properly with 1 PSU before it just decided to give up, but I will see if swapping in a new PSU fixes the issue...

 

[Koop]

Sorry for your loss.

R7*0 upgrade when?