troubleshooting power(?) issue with ROMED8-2T

[oldmanmtn]

I have a brand new ASRock ROMED8-2T. The installation seemed to go completely smoothly, but the system won't fully power on. When I hit the power button, the fans spin, the power LED comes on, and the IPMI interface comes up. There are also two LEDs on on the motherboard - a solid LED right above "AUX PANEL 1" and a blinking LED between PCIE1 and PCIE2.

I can connect to IPMI over the network. The the VSB sensors (3, 5, 1.8) are all green, as is the battery sensor. Every other sensor is "Not available" or "no event assertion."

If I go to 'System Information -> Power Source' both slots report "Power Supply Error". That sounds bad, but the main sensor page seems to be saying that the power is fine, so I'm not sure how to interpret this. My guess is that this is because I have nothing connected to the PSU SMBus Header.

If I ask IPMI to power on the board, it tries a couple of times before reporting "Performing power action failed."

There is no activity on the "Dr Debug" LED. I can't tell if I'm even getting the system beep because the chassis only has an HD Audio connection - not a simple Speaker connection.

The full component list is pretty minimal:

case: Corsair Carbide Series Air 540 (CC-9011030-WW)
cpu: AMD EPYC Rome 7262 8-Core 3.2 GHz
power supply: Seasonic FOCUS PX-750, 750W 80+
memory: Micron/Crucial PC4-2666V 2RX4 CL19 1.2V ECC DDR4 Memory (MTA36ASF2G72PZ-2G6E1)
storage: M2 SSD (currently sitting next to the box, to rule it out as part of the problem).

 

[Rychek]

I'm using a SeaSonic SS-750KM3 750W in my recent ROMED8-2T build and I have the same PSU Error message in the Power Source info page. However, my systems worked just fine (I had to remove the RAM for return, so I can't power it on ATM).

Do you have another PSU you can try?

 

[oldmanmtn]

I don't have another PSU - unless I disassemble my current workhorse server. Since the fans are spinning and IPMI is coming online, this doesn't feel like a power issue, so I'm not eager to do surgery on my working system. It might be possible to temporarily connect the new power supply to the old system without _too_ much work. That might be worth trying.

 

[Rychek]

That should work as a troubleshooting step. That would allow you to rule out the PSU at least.

Just to clarify, when you say "hit the power button" do you mean the chassis power button? If so, how long are you waiting from applying power to the system to pushing the power button?

Keep in mind that if you hit the power button on the chassis before the BMC is finished booting, the default behavior (on my board at least) is to wait for the BMC to load/start before proceeding to bootstrap the main system. The system will appear to hang during power up unit the BMC is ready.


On my system, when I turn on the PSU by plugging in the power cable and flipping the switch to on (on the PSU its self) the BMC controller boots (takes a few minutes) up and I get the heartbeat LED between the PCI slots blinking and a solid green LED by the CMOS battery. I'm also able to access IPMI via the network. My NIC LEDs light up as well if they are plugged in and I get light on the NIC activity LEDs on the front of my chassis (I'm using a NORCO 4220). At this point I can hit the chassis power button and it starts normally. Is it safe to assume that when you get to the point where the LEDs are lit and press the chassis power button, the fans spin up, but bootstrap does not occur?

 

[oldmanmtn]

Yes - you've described the behavior exactly, and better than I did. I do not have a monitor attached to this system, so I am using the IPMI KVM to see the "screen". I suppose it's possible that the system actually is reaching POST or BIOS, and the KVM just isn't showing it. (I don't even have a VGA monitor in the house anymore, so a KVM failure is basically as fatal as a motherboard failure to me).

As of this morning, it seems IPMI isn't coming online either. The fans still spin up when I press the chassis power button, the SB_PWR1 LED on the board is on, the ethernet lights are flickering, but the BMC heartbeat LED is off and there are no packets coming out of the IPMI port. The box hasn't been touched since IPMI worked last night, so I have no explanation for the change in behavior.

ASRock support got back to me with some basic questions, so I'll see what they suggest. If I have time, I'll try the PSU on my other box.

 

[mzzm]

Did you ever resolve this? I am having exactly the same issue with this board with both a 7551 and 7502. IPMI is working currently, but I cannot get the board to boot either from the physical switch or from IPMI.

 

[mzzm]

So an update for other people having this issue. Following the advice above, I switched power supplies and all of the issues were resolved. This board just simply refuses to boot with an EVGA 1300W G2 Supernova power supply. The power supply is brand new and tested in two of our workstations (Ryzen 3900X) and works without issues. I've scoped the rails on the supply and nothing looks out of spec at least as far as I can tell so no idea whats going on.

Temporarily switching to an EVGA 750W with the exact same configuration and it boots and functions fine with either the 7551 or 7502 processors. This is pretty disappointing behavior as I guess we'll just randomly try some other high wattage power supplies to see what works.

 

[csp-guy]

I have same issue with Seasonic FOCUS-GX-850 PSU.

 

[dragonian]

I had a supermicro board H11ssl with behavior similar to this, and RMA'd it. The tech notes sounded like they reset the bios, and now it's working - same board. I swear i tried that. but might be something to try.