Phew, that was a close thing.
Bought an old-tech server board last week, a Tyan s7012 and promptly bricked it, which was a bit awkward as it had arrived brand-new in box already populated for a workstation build. Looks like it was originally intended for a Lenovo, with a pair of Xeon X5670s and 48GB of memory, which then became surplus to requirements as the newer models came out. Dirt cheap, too. I suspect I may have got lucky as the surplus seller cleared out the last of his stock.
After a couple of days of head-scratching, cursing and general weeping wailing and gnashing of teeth, I fixed it. Well, I'm not sure I actually did, but it works now. There's an undocumented blue jumper (J49) which I moved, and I suspect it might be BIOS recovery related. Nothing to lose at that point anyway, so gave it a shot, having tried everything else.
Much mashing of Delete and F1 ensued and I was rewarded with a boot screen.
It's now running a trial stick of USB Mint to give it a bit of a workout and when a new SSD arrives I'll have it BOINCing for a few days to assess how noisy it is with these workstation fans.
Lesson #1: never pick up a USB stick and blindly insert it without checking what is actually on it. Instead of Mint, it had a bios for a Supermicro board, which pretty much screwed over this one. It shouldn't have read it without a prompt, but meh. That's the only thing I can think of that might have caused it to go awry, because the previous evening it was happily running for hours with the BIOS screen up while I kept an eye on the temps, etc.
Rather usefully, Supermicro IPMI View works with it, too.
Bought an old-tech server board last week, a Tyan s7012 and promptly bricked it, which was a bit awkward as it had arrived brand-new in box already populated for a workstation build. Looks like it was originally intended for a Lenovo, with a pair of Xeon X5670s and 48GB of memory, which then became surplus to requirements as the newer models came out. Dirt cheap, too. I suspect I may have got lucky as the surplus seller cleared out the last of his stock.
After a couple of days of head-scratching, cursing and general weeping wailing and gnashing of teeth, I fixed it. Well, I'm not sure I actually did, but it works now. There's an undocumented blue jumper (J49) which I moved, and I suspect it might be BIOS recovery related. Nothing to lose at that point anyway, so gave it a shot, having tried everything else.
Much mashing of Delete and F1 ensued and I was rewarded with a boot screen.
It's now running a trial stick of USB Mint to give it a bit of a workout and when a new SSD arrives I'll have it BOINCing for a few days to assess how noisy it is with these workstation fans.
Lesson #1: never pick up a USB stick and blindly insert it without checking what is actually on it. Instead of Mint, it had a bios for a Supermicro board, which pretty much screwed over this one. It shouldn't have read it without a prompt, but meh. That's the only thing I can think of that might have caused it to go awry, because the previous evening it was happily running for hours with the BIOS screen up while I kept an eye on the temps, etc.
Rather usefully, Supermicro IPMI View works with it, too.
