Wow, I had no idea you had all these options. I'll have to try try F11 to PXE boot. That could come in handy. But I do know that you can just about lean on the F12 key to get the boot menu. Timing is not important. Some machines will beep when you've pressed the F12 key enough times and the boot menu is there, some won't. It does not depend entirely on whether the machine has a PC speaker. But I just keep pressing the F12 key over and over until I am pretty sure the boot menu is there. After a while, you get to know how long that is for different machines. Also handy is a light sensor. You can tell if the Dell logo is on the screen by putting a light sensore right on the monitor almost exactly in the middle and moving it around a little as the machine boots. At some point, you'll find a bright spot in the middle of the screen and then it will disappear. At that point, if you've been pressing the F12 key again and again, you should be in the boot menu. If it stays bright, you have done something wrong and you are probably either booting or you are in the BIOS setup program. Once you get into the boot menu, you can press the arrow keys to move to different boot options. Often, I press the down arrow once and see what happens. Maybe it will try to boot from the CD-ROM drive. If that's not what I want, I press Control+Alt+Delete to start over and try pressing the down arrow twice. Then try pressing the down arrow 3 times. This way, you can determined. determine how the boot sequence is configured in the BIOS. On 11/11/13 17:35, Andrew Hodgson wrote:
Hi,
I am very familiar with these types of servers, unfortunately the Youtube video is blank so I can't see what is going on.
When you unplugged the drive the system was still in POST, it doesn't actually try and boot until after the remote access card has initialised. The sequence for all this is:
- Memory test - BIOS screen with Dell logo. - CPU and RAM information. - On some servers the SATA port status are displayed, this is what I think your friend was referring to. - NIC firmware initialisation. - RAID controller or disk initialisation - IDRAC/remote access card initialisation. - It then tries to boot.
When you get the Dell logo on the screen, in top right hand corner there is a BIOS function key map. This is something like: F2: BIOS setup F10: System Services (Dell's answer to SmartStart) F11: PXE boot F12: boot menu
You need to press the options when they come up after the Dell logo, once you press F12, the option changes to show you are entering the relevant option, you wait around 20-30 seconds after starting the machine up, and press F12 then, it will then go into boot menu.
Some other key combinations are: Ctrl+s at NIC initialisation: configure some NIC specific options. Ctrl+R at RAID initialisation: configure the RAID controller, get RAIDs configured etc. Ctrl+E at IDRAC initialisation: configure DRAC settings.
Hope this helps.
-----Original Message----- From: Blind-sysadmins [mailto:blind-sysadmins-bounces@lists.hodgsonfamily.org] On Behalf Of Katherine Moss Sent: 11 November 2013 20:36 To: Blind sysadmins list Subject: Re: [Blind-sysadmins] Has anyone around here booted a Dell PowerEdge server from USB before?
Oops. My YouTube channel is: http://youtube.com/user/thechromebuster
-----Original Message----- From: Blind-sysadmins [mailto:blind-sysadmins-bounces@lists.hodgsonfamily.org] On Behalf Of Katherine Moss Sent: Monday, November 11, 2013 3:34 PM To: 'blind-sysadmins@lists.hodgsonfamily.org' Subject: [Blind-sysadmins] Has anyone around here booted a Dell PowerEdge server from USB before?
Hi all, I'm curious if this has ever been done by any of you guys. I'm trying to figure out how to do this with my server right now, and I can't. I have a video up on YouTube (my sighted friend is reading the options to me as we move along), so if anyone can offer feedback via the video, it would be great. I can only get the server to boot consistently from the hard drive; I don't see an option for USB. Any feedback is much appreciated.
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-- --- John G. Heim, 608-263-4189, jheim@math.wisc.edu