Could anyone give me a quick sanity check here? I have an Unraid machine that is suddenly failing to POST out of the blue, never had an issue with this build before. I'm not super well versed with troubleshooting this kind of thing (this is my first build) so I would really appreciate some feedback as I have a feeling that there's something obvious that I've missed here. At this point I'm guessing that it's some kind of hardware issue and nothing to do with Unraid but I'm at a total loss and not sure where else to ask.. if this doesn't belong here please let me know.

 

Here are the specs:

 

 

It's getting power. I usually run this server headless and one day I was just not able to access it via web gui like normal. So I reboot, everything looks/sounds normal, still no web gui. So I hook up a monitor via VGA to see what's up, and it's booting to a black screen with a blinking cursor at the top right. I reboot, try to get into BIOS, but my keystrokes seem to have no effect. The keyboard is working (lights come on and the pc makes a faint click sound upon key press, no idea what that's about) initial boot screen says F2/DEL to enter bios, and I can't get there. Tried mashing it from power on all the way til the cursor screen. Tried holding it down from boot. Tried timing it to only hit it once right when the message comes up. Tried this probably 20 times so far, no dice. 

 

Other things I've tried:

-Moving the Unraid boot USB to another port, tried every USB port on the machine
-Pulled the boot USB and checked it on my Windows machine, no errors, file structure looks normal
-Unplugging all other peripherals aside from keyboard + monitor
-Moving Ethernet cable to different ports

-Checked my router to see if it could see the server, it could not

 

If I kill the power to the PSU then boot, it shows an IPMI initialization sequence which is successful, after which I can see the IPMI heartbeat LED blinking like normal. Then it reboots into the supermicro logo screen:

 

At the bottom right it shows a "99" followed briefly by a "B4", then immediately into a black screen with the blinking cursor. 

 

The mobo manual (https://www.supermicro.com/manuals/motherboard/C202_C204/MNL-1270.pdf) does not mention alphanumeric boot codes at all, so I'm not sure what those mean. It does mention some beep codes, and the mobo does beep upon boot like normal, but it only mentions three beep codes and seems wholly unhelpful. 

 

I figure IPMI might be something good to try but I have no idea where to even start with that. Not sure if it's even possible given that my router doesn't seem to acknowledge the machine on the network at all. Also not sure if that'd be possible given that I can't seem to enter BIOS at all. I'm not even sure what the black screen with the blinking cursor indicates. I am soooo lost at this point. 

 

Any help would be massively appreciated. Happy to provide any other info that'd help with the troubleshooting process. 

Long shot, have you by chance a spare keyboard lying around to try f2/del?  Getting into bios seems to be the priority and options are limited.

 

 

I do, should have mentioned I did try two different keyboards. At one point I suspected the spare board I was using initially may have been dead so I popped it into my main Windows machine, and it works fine (including the delete key). Tried a second keyboard just for the hell of it, no dice. 

Bizarrely, the server booted and came back online. 

 

I was about to try and connect it to my Windows desktop direct via ethernet using it's IPMI port. Looking at the back of the modem/router I noticed my three working computers had a flashing green LED and the port occupied by the cable connecting to the unraid machine had an amber LED. I wasn't sure what this indicated, thought it may have been a link speed indicator, so I unplugged one of my other machines and moved the unraid ethernet cable into that port. Amber LED there too. On a whim, I decided to try booting it up in this configuration, and it fired right up. 

 

I haven't done any further testing because I'm a little scared that if I touch anything it'll immediately break again 😅

 

Any advice on what that behavior could possible indicate? Anything I should try to grab from the console while it's still booted? (logs, diagnostics? idk)

 

Thanks!

Sounds like a case of pfm to me.  Try not to say anything mean or even look at it funny, hopefully it will continue to do it's job.