I picked up a 2U supermicro with an X9 main board and have been trying to get into the bios to let it know what dries it has but have not been able to. Manual says to press ‘del’ during startup but it hasn’t worked, Is there something I am missing? Getting a bit frustrated. Any ideas?
Turn on power, keep stabbing the delete key repeatedly until you hear a group of beeps, then stop stabbing the delete key. I’ve found my X10 a little tricky to get into the bios as well at times!
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I will give that a try
Also, are you seeing anything on the screen or via the IMPI interface? If it’s not completing POST then you can’t get into the BIOS.
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Was finally able to look at it again and after much tapping and rebooting decided to reset the bios. Took more tapping but finally got in to the BIOS. Felt like a major win. It has 12 drive bays and I have drives in 11 of them but when I look at the BIOS it only shows three i th boot list and none on the SATA list. Not sure what’s going on there but was going to try loading TruNas on a usb drive and see what I can get it to do. All the drives in it are good. Going to check the cabled and connections again. When it boots up the 11 bays that have drives turn on red lights for a few seconds then go out. Totally unfamiliar with Supermicros so pretty steep learning curve.
I also set the date to 2015 as I saw where some of these wont go into BIOS if the date is after 2020
This is perfectly normal. After that, you get steady blue lights in bays with SAS drives and no blue light for bays with SATA. The blue light then blinks with activity.
Steady red light after the boot means a bad disk. Slow blinking red light means a hot spare (usually only for hardware RAID). Fast blinking red light along with blue activity is a rebuilding disk (again, usually only hardware RAID).
The boot list in the BIOS shows only the first of each of the different types of drives (USB, on-board SATA, HBA/RAID connected, etc.). You have to drill down to see all the drives of the same type, and move them around in the boot order. In both IT mode and RAID mode, an HBA might not present any drives to the BIOS, depending on configuration.
Also, update the BIOS to the latest version. X9SRL-F got bifurcation support by doing this, and so it can use PCIe cards with NVMe drives attached.
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Just be really really careful to read the instructions and make sure you have a plan B to go back to the old BIOS if you need to. My X10 board was bricked with a bad BIOS download from Supermicro and getting an old one back on it was painful, partly because my model of X10 didn’t actually have the jumpers pins the manual says it should have…
Thank you. That makes me feel better. It’s nice to know so far its normal. I looked through all the bios options one at a time and didn’t see here it listed any of the drives, or at least i thought I did. Though I did see a blue light flash once and it tried installing windows as one of the disks must have a copy of windows 8 on it. I created a usb stick with the score software and have a usb drive to install it on for now, until I figure out which drive is what in this machine. want to get a small SSD drive for a system drive but figured a usb ssd drive (not a stick) would work for now.
scale, not score
Well, that sounds like you had a good time with that. not.
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Speaking of the software. Am I right in installing Scale over Core. I couldnt find anything that put one over the other and not familiar with either. tia
Depends on who you ask. Me personally, I’d say CORE all the way. But given what’s going on with SCALE picking up all the hype I’d recommend going SCALE.
Yeah, sadly Supermicro only have the latest BIOS on their website for each model, not the previous ones, so getting an older BIOS isn’t always straight forward. I did find a fantastic resource which keeps links to the previous versions!
For me personally the simpler the better. I am looking to just use this as a NAS for storing family photos. Lots of them as my siblings want me to store theirs as well.
Access to the web eventually
SCALE would suit your needs. It’s simple enough for straightforward tasks like that.