A new hope

Okay, it's not good, but it's not very bad either. Looks like my worst case scenario just came to play. What to do? What to do? Okay, let's start with something. b7. Where's my manual? Here we go. It has to mean something. "b7. NVRAM configuration reset". Great. Google, you are my last resort. Still nothing? Somebody mentioned main board replacement? I'm so screwed...

Going back to the very beginning of the story - a month ago (yeah, I promised to put it next day, sorry about that) I finally decided to order all missing parts and put together my new toy^H^H^Htool. It was quite funny, but at the end it failed. Ended up with dark screen (didn't show even a thing) and this mystery b7 code on led indicator. I had to figure this out. It could be anything. So the first one and most obvious, easiest to tshoot was memory. I removed all three DIMMs and put back only one. First one... Nothing. Second... Like a charm! So after a bit of experimenting it revealed that both 4GB banks works perfectly, but third, 8GB one does not. 

First thought was that it was damaged, but then I realized that it may be some compatibility issue and after confirming that I don't have most recent BIOS version I've gone for upgrade. After that I was able to run every single memory bank, but only two of them at the same time. Weird, isn't it? After a little bit of further experiments I discovered that my manual is wrong and I changed the placement of memories in the slots for a few times. Then I finally managed to have my server up & running.

Ready-Steady-Go?

Oh no, wait. I still need some storage. Here is the great part. This mainboard has on-board USB slot, so you can plug in any USB device you want directly into motherboard. How cool is that? Of course I'll run my ESXi from usb and have all my disk space dedicated to the data stores. Okay, usb stick plugged in, drives mounted and connected. Onboard RAID controller enabled and assigned to all SATA ports.

Power-on, go to RAID controller ctrl-m, ctrl-m, ctrl-m... There we go! Crash course mode on, learning by doing. After a bit of time walking around the RAID controller BIOS i found out, that my 500-GB Seagate Constellation actually reports more than 2TB of capacity. I got these drives somehow second-hand, so my first thought was "Great, I thought that they are 0,5TB and they are actually 2.5!", but then I realized that I cannot initialize array on them. Moreover, I already noticed strange sounds from them just after powering on the machine. Another failure...


Then I recalled that I have my good old 500GB transcend drive. It spent last few years in the cabinet, so without any regrets I got it outside of case and put it into the server. Maybe its not long-term solution, but at least its gonna allow me to have some start. Then I'll move to new disks once I'll have it.




At the end? Thats it? Up & Running. 16GB Memory. Booting from USB Stick. 500GB of Storage. Good to go! Let's setup PXE and finally install ESXi!. In the mean time, let's make some review.