February 25, 201016 yr I just built an unRaid server with a Gigabye GA-790XTA-UD4 motherboard. For some reason I cannot get the board to boot without a video card in the system. I configured the BIOS not to halt on any errors, but no luck. Gigabyte phone support was a complete waste of time. Anyone have any success booting this board or similar without a VGA card?
February 25, 201016 yr Sorry. You're out of luck. You will need a video card of some-sort. It seems all PC motherboards require some sort of video. The exception are the boards with IPMI enabled, which usually has video built-in.
February 25, 201016 yr My Gigabyte Mainboard doesn't have onboard Graphics Card, but I installed an old school S3 Virge PCI Graphics card. I use my server headless, though it is great to have some kind of video in the instance if your unRAID server fails to boot up or if you have it connected to a KVM to get to it without Telnet. Hope this helps.
February 26, 201016 yr Sorry. You're out of luck. You will need a video card of some-sort. It seems all PC motherboards require some sort of video. The exception are the boards with IPMI enabled, which usually has video built-in. I believe the supermicro server class boards can operate without a video card. Many of them have video redirection over the serial port. But this is workstation/server class boards.
February 27, 201016 yr That is the reason why I went for the old S3 Virge PCI graphics card. It consumes very little power, dispatches virtually not heat, it only occupies one PCI slot, which most mainboards still have at lease one slot these days, and you need no spectacular GPU to run unRAID being it is only a text-based Linux OS. I tried without a Graphics Card on mine first, but it seems that without any onboard graphics already integrated into the mainboard or something to supplement as a video output, you need some kind of Video device to keep the mainboard happy. I'm certain older mainboards back in the day could run headless, but they could of had an integrated GPU on it (some even had a header/dongle from the mainboard to a Bracket, kind of like a Serial/Parallel port Bracket), so I can't really confirm this fact. Some BIOSs support a POST setting that if it detects no No Video, it'll boot up without an error, but I believe it still needs a some sort of video output device (Add-on card or integrated), it just doesn't need to be connected to any external display in order to start up. I think without any video device, the POST will fail and you won't kick past the BIOS stage. I'd be interested if I'm proven wrong on this theory though . Cheers!
February 27, 201016 yr Ditto for me. I had to install a PCI ATI Rage card into my setup so that it would boot. Even if mine would run headless I am not sure I would want it to. A PCI card uses so little power that it would not be hardly even noticed in the power consumption. I just went online to craigslist and found 3 PCI cards for really cheap. If/when I build another unRAID machine I can use those other PCI cards for video.
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