This post will be short and sweet. If you have an R740xd with a rear flex bay you need high performance fans installed otherwise fan speed will remain at 100%. I’ve seen this behavior time and time again.
Here’s a screenshot of the fans with standard cooling fans installed:
And here is a screenshot right after the installation of high performance fans:
It may be necessary to reset iDRAC after installation of high performance fans.
If you upgrade your 14 gen DELL server to an Intel Xeon Scalable 2nd Gen CPU, you may receive this error.
Common second gen CPUs:
Chances are your BIOS is outdated and doesn’t support second gen processors. DELL did not introduce support for these processors until BIOS version 2.2.10. If you have a version below that you will receive this error without a doubt.
What you’ll have to do is install a first GEN CPU, update the BIOS, and then reinstall the second GEN processors.
Just update the BIOS and you’ll be good to go.
I’ve probably had hundreds of servers freeze at this particular screen over my time dealing with servers. It gets to the loading bios drivers screen. You count the dots one by one and watch closely. One dot. two dots. 5 dots. And then nothing. The dots stop coming.
In almost every case I’ve found bad memory to be the culprit. In fact, I am documenting this while dealing with the exact problem. An R640 with 16 sticks of memory. It’s freezing. I know there’s a bad stick somewhere.
The only question is what’s the fastest way to locate the bad stick so you can move on with your life?
With a lot of memory I like to remove all the DIMMs from the black slots first. It’s up to you. The whole idea is to keep removing DIMMs until the darn thing boots up. If you remove sticks and it still freezes, that means the sticks you pulled out were good. In a 2 CPU configuration remove them evenly from both sides to prevent unbalanced memory errors.
Now, if you remove a bunch of sticks and it boots up, that means the bad stick is in the group of DIMMs you just pulled out. To find the bad one you now put them back in the server one by one. Once it freezes up you have found the bad DIMM. Replace it.
Sometimes you’ll do this process only to find the DIMMs just needed to be reseated. That’s fine, in the end it’s just about fixing the problem.
You may run into a case where a G9 server fails to boot into the HP Smart Storage Administrator. In my case the server would freeze here after hitting enter.
It’s not actually frozen but hitting enter does nothing and your only recourse is to just reboot the server.
Beyond that you may also notice Intelligent Provisioning appears to be completely borked. And most of the time this is the case.
The resolution is to simply reinstall Intelligent Provisioning. Start by downloading a copy here.
The file will come in an ISO format. Turn this into a bootable USB or alternatively just boot from it using the remote console in iLO. If you have difficulties making the USB I find booting it from the virtual KVM almost always works.
This is the screen you want to see. You’ll get a progress bar and the whole process takes about 10 – 15 minutes. The UID light will flash blue indicating a firmware update is taking place.
Once the system restarts you can attempt to boot into the Smart Storage Administrator once again.
In my case I was now able to successfully boot into the software and configure my drives.
One of my R640s presented a PCIe error with the following iDRAC log.
A fatal error was detected on a component at bus 25 device 0 function 0.
At boot time I received a generic PCIe error message prompting me to dig deeper into the logs. Going into the BIOS and looking at the devices it was immediately apparent what the problem was.
The server was not seeing my NDC.
Replacing the NDC resolved the issue. However, if you’re unable to determine the problematic device you can also do the following.
In iDRAC, navigate to system—>Inventory—>hardware inventory.
Here you will see hardware info related to devices and their associated bus numbers. Finding the bus number referenced in the error will tell you which device is causing the problem.
Here you can see bus number 25 is associated with the NDC:
Sometimes it’s not this easy though. If you can’t locate the bus number the best troubleshooting step is simply removing PCIe devices one by one until the error goes away. Reseat the component and replace it if the problem remains.