GIGABYTE MB10 Datto Motherbaord Xeon D-1521 with I/O Shield - $130 + shipping

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klammore

Member
Jun 17, 2016
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Anyone with a working one able to follow the BIOS update procedures from Gigabyte to SAVE and host a working BIOS image down?

I'd rather try to reflash a working ROM than try to update to an unsupported one...

Thanks.

-- Dave
-Removed-

After stress testing for 20 hours board is dead.
 
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acquacow

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Feb 15, 2017
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Thanks!

I plugged the BMC into a switch, and it did grab DHCP, even though the VGA output shows it as still loading. I can get into the web admin page, but none of the link sections on the left side of the page actually load anything when they are clicked on.

I wonder if the BMC won't load if no drives are attached/etc? I wonder what the base requirements are for the BMC to work?


Edit: Alright, so the BMC doesn't load in chrome, but once I loaded it in Firefox, not only did the page actually populate and work, but it seems once the BMC was loaded up in a page, turning the board on allowed it to populate some info and now it looks like it might actually boot if I give it a boot device. It actually completes POST and drops me to an EFI shell after not finding a boot device.

Edit2: Nope, now I'm back to waiting on BMC initialization after a cold reboot. I'm logged into the web console and that is working, but powering the board up doesn't seem to get it into bios/etc.
 
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ru me

Active Member
Jun 2, 2018
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I have trouble getting my board to do anything. After plugging in the PSU nothing happens. Shouldn't the boot LED come on? Any tricks to get the power button to work? I only have ECC UDIMMs but I think they should work in this board. There are several on the compatibility list of the other MB10 boards. Any direct experience? From the info on the gigabyte site it seems that the BMC should work on the bare board without memory or anything else. Is this true?

Any help appreciated but it unfortunately looks like this will need to go back.
 

nev_neo

Active Member
Jul 31, 2013
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I know this might be a long shot, but just to cover all bases - are you guys plugging in the aux 8-pin power ?
I know I had similar issues with my gigabyte/datto board, but that was running the d-1541 cpu. Plugging in the aux power made everything work perfectly, even the BMC.
Also, once your get into BIOS, there is a setting in there to "wait for BMC initialization" or something similar. Disabling that lets it boot up a whole lot quicker.
 

acquacow

Well-Known Member
Feb 15, 2017
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I know this might be a long shot, but just to cover all bases - are you guys plugging in the aux 8-pin power ?
I know I had similar issues with my gigabyte/datto board, but that was running the d-1541 cpu. Plugging in the aux power made everything work perfectly, even the BMC.
Also, once your get into BIOS, there is a setting in there to "wait for BMC initialization" or something similar. Disabling that lets it boot up a whole lot quicker.
Yup, CPU 8-pin is connected.

Flipping through the BIOS, I see nothing about waiting for BMC initialization.
 

acquacow

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Feb 15, 2017
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Alright, I've updated the bios and the BMC, but with no change to boot issues.

The only way I can get this thing to boot currently is with the following sequence:

1) Power on PSU
2) Hold power on board and shut it off
3) Login to IPMI web page
4) Power up board with either power button on board, or soft-menu in the IPMI.
 

klammore

Member
Jun 17, 2016
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Look at jumper settings maybe? Mine are:
Clear CMOS 1-2
ME Update 2-3
ME Recovery 1-2
S3 power on 2-3

the 3 on the left
Bios PWD 1-2
BIOS RCVR 1-2
??? 2-3

Pin layout is 1-2-3 left to right with PCI positioned at top.

Edit: Also any error logs in the BMC? I'm guessing you are KISS while troubleshooting. I don't have any PCI devices plugged in and the 1 sata device worked without issue.
 

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acquacow

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Feb 15, 2017
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My jumpers are in the same position as yours, and as in the document.

BMC logs:
 

acquacow

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Feb 15, 2017
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I had zero luck getting the board to post on Sunday, tried all combos of things. I wanted to get in one last time to update the Management Engine, but it seems like it's fubar or just not worth the time. I did get a refund and the ability to keep the hardware, so maybe I can take a multimeter to it and see if any capacitors are dead/etc.
 

dstanding

Member
Jan 27, 2015
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Morristown NJ
I had zero luck getting the board to post on Sunday, tried all combos of things. I wanted to get in one last time to update the Management Engine, but it seems like it's fubar or just not worth the time. I did get a refund and the ability to keep the hardware, so maybe I can take a multimeter to it and see if any capacitors are dead/etc.
Same, I contacted the seller about it and they immediately offered a refund. So I'm $0 into this board now which is nice, but I would still like to try and figure out what's going on.

I plugged the BMC NIC into a switch and its activity lights are blinking, but I'm not seeing it in the DHCP list on my router.
 

acquacow

Well-Known Member
Feb 15, 2017
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I need to see a tear-down of a datto box this came out of and see what else was plugged into this board. I see that the BMC has PSU monitoring and such, I wonder if it's waiting for status from some component that isn't plugged in anymore. I should be able to edit the BMC firmware to ignore such things...
 

dstanding

Member
Jan 27, 2015
97
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Morristown NJ
I need to see a tear-down of a datto box this came out of and see what else was plugged into this board. I see that the BMC has PSU monitoring and such, I wonder if it's waiting for status from some component that isn't plugged in anymore. I should be able to edit the BMC firmware to ignore such things...
It came out of a Datto Siris, which is just a UNAS 400/401/410. The PSU doesn't have PMBus or anything. There isn't chassis intrusion.

The only thing I can think of is TPM maybe? But other people were able to get it to work out of the box. I wonder if we just have crap luck.
 

sfbayzfs

Active Member
May 6, 2015
259
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SF Bay area
I got 8 of them for a mini cluster project, the packing was great (InstaPak foam is fantastic!) and the seller is very responsive.

Unfortunately, five were bad with basically the same symptoms as others report, with three variants:
  • BMC init / 06 message and then no video thereafter, eventually green rear light turns amber after fan slow, fast for a bit, then slow again
  • same sequence, but with no video ever
  • no fan or video no matter how many times I tap / hold the power button, the only light ever is a green LED near the BMC chip, presumably BMC heartbeat light like on a Supermicro board
The full good boot sequence seems to be (roughly)
  1. BMC init message (this can last for a while - I timed it at 1:21 with nothing connected to the BMC)
  2. Chipset init message (this immediately replaces BMC init message, and can also last for 20 seconds or so as well)
  3. graphical splash screen with text messages - press DEL here to get into BIOS so you can reset settings, fix boot order, etc.
I did not flash BIOS or BMC firmware on my good boards yet, but once I set BIOS to defaults and changed the boot order to a USB stick, I was able to run memtest on all of them with no issues.

Here are some potentially interesting points from my testing and comparing good boards to bad:
  1. I visually compared the good boards to the bad ones and the jumpers are all identical.
  2. One good board had a BIOS password on the list @dstanding posted, which I was able to clear
  3. The good boards will run on just one stick of ECC Reg or ECC unbuffered
  4. The good boards will actually run with no RAM to the point of displaying a message about no RAM detected!
  5. The rear light that eventually turns from green to amber on bad boards also turns from green to amber eventually on good boards, so it is (hopefully) not an indicator that something is wrong
  6. CMOS reset / battery removal overnight did not seem to effect my bad boards in any way, but it's still worth a try
  7. I even tried installing a low power PCIe video card in the bad board which does not give any video, but does go amber. No video on the card either, and the heatsink on the video card didn't warm up appreciably after a few minutes, so it may not even be getting initialized.
Other notes of interest:

For my test bench, I use desktop PSUs. My first generation Xeon D Supermicro board is picky about power supplies, and will not start when powered by some 80+ desktop PSUs. A few other boards I have also seem to be picky about active PFC PSUs, but I have an old inefficient passive PFC PSU which seems to start any board which doesn't like 80+ PSUs, so I used that PSU for all of my testing above.

I wonder if this is just a batch with a high failure rate, or something like the BMC flash chip death problem on some Asrock Rack boards, or something like the Atom C2000 series issue.
 
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Marsh

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May 12, 2013
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Here is another data sample

I brought 6 boards,.
1 board not power on
2 boards no video out
2 boards stuck on "BMC initialization" code 6

1 board after few false start, it finally booted, I left it running with memtest86 for 60hours.
I felt confident, I power the working system off. hooked up a windows 10 ssd.
Power it on again, the 60hours working boards is dead "BMC initialization" code 6.
remove the SSD, board still dead.

How in the world , it ran 60hours then failed a power off / on boot.
 

mmo

Well-Known Member
Sep 17, 2016
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Here is another data sample

I brought 6 boards,.
1 board not power on
2 boards no video out
2 boards stuck on "BMC initialization" code 6

1 board after few false start, it finally booted, I left it running with memtest86 for 60hours.
I felt confident, I power the working system off. hooked up a windows 10 ssd.
Power it on again, the 60hours working boards is dead "BMC initialization" code 6.
remove the SSD, board still dead.

How in the world , it ran 60hours then failed a power off / on boot.
oh man, i feel your pain ....
 

Marsh

Moderator
May 12, 2013
2,663
1,510
113
I posted my experience with the 60 hours good working board , with the same PSU and RAM , then it died for no reason

I am happy to get all my $823.53 back, not have any more financial interest in this deal.
I just do not have any confidence with these boards,
 

sfbayzfs

Active Member
May 6, 2015
259
145
43
SF Bay area
Here is another data sample

I brought 6 boards,.
1 board not power on
2 boards no video out
2 boards stuck on "BMC initialization" code 6

1 board after few false start, it finally booted, I left it running with memtest86 for 60hours.
I felt confident, I power the working system off. hooked up a windows 10 ssd.
Power it on again, the 60hours working boards is dead "BMC initialization" code 6.
remove the SSD, board still dead.

How in the world , it ran 60hours then failed a power off / on boot.
Ugh, I just went back to try my three "good" boards based on this, but I only have two test rigs - so far, one of them is OK (for now) and got into memtest again, the second one is now stuck at the Chipset initialization message and refusing to boot :(
 

sfbayzfs

Active Member
May 6, 2015
259
145
43
SF Bay area
Ugh, I just went back to try my three "good" boards based on this, but I only have two test rigs - so far, one of them is OK (for now) and got into memtest again, the second one is now stuck at the Chipset initialization message and refusing to boot :(
Semi-False Alarm - It was stuck at chipset initialization with "B7" in the corner.

On Supermicro boards, early POST codes indicate RAM slots, and on this board, "B7" seems to be the blue RAM slot closest to the edge of the board - reseating the 16GB unbuffered ECC Micron stick I was using several times did not fix it, but switching to an ECC Reg 16GB Micron stick made it happy again, Phew - sort of!

I tried the Micron ECC unbuffered 16GB stick on the other board I was testing now, and it also got stuck at B7, going back to ECC Reg made it happy again also.

Before, I definitely booted at least one of the three good boards with this same ECC unbuffered stick and got it through a full run of memtest, so this still has me worried. Maybe not liking ECC unbuffered anymore is an early failure sign, but these should be happy with it.

EDIT / Update - I found my other two pieces of 16GB DDR4 ECC unbuffered and a board is happily booted with each, running memtest overnight. One is a Micron SO-DIMM in an adapter, the other is some off brand I can't read because the label is behind the power connector. All of the unbuffered and registered are 2400T speed 2Rx8, go figure.
 
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klammore

Member
Jun 17, 2016
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Yeah... I stress tested mine for around 20 hours and upon power cycling started receiving the BMC initialization error. Board is unfortunately unreliable.