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I bought a 4 bay version of the HP Proliant DL180 G6 with 2x Intel Xeon L5640 and 16GB of RAM. It also has 2 x 2TB SAS Drives in Raid 1 installed. Additionally I added a SSD which should later have the OS on it (the problems were there even before installing the SSD).

So the Problem I am encountering is that no matter what I try I cant boot from neither USB or CD. It also seems like the Intel Boot Assistant GE v1.3.24 does want me to Install the OS via PXE. This is another problem, the system posts fine, detects all drives and also optional USB sticks. It lets me configure the RAID controller and I also get into the BIOS setup, but after that I get stuck, because it does not find the boot media.

I now also added some pictures taken during the post and from the bios.

Now the stuff I tried already:
When i enter the Boot Assistant Setup I should be able to turn PXE support off and boot the system ROM based, but I always get no other option avalible when trying to deselect the PXE boot.

I tried multiple different USB sticks and a CD aswell.

I tried different OS from vmware vSphere 5.1 over RHL6 and Windows Server 2008 to SUSE11 neither did work on USB or CD.

I tried to set up a proxy DHCP server on a Raspberry Pi to serve the OS via PXE, but that also did not seem to work since the options did not get catched by the DHCP.

I tried resetting the CMOS as described in this post but that did not do anything aswell.

I tried to only select the harddrive (USB stick) in the boot order and exclude the Network boot completely.

Here the stuff I thought about trying:
With this stuff I am not confident, that it works so I am asking it here if that would work.

Can I insert the SSD into a different PC, boot the OS onto it and then swap it back into the Server?

A thing I thought about this morning is if I can just skip the boot media search with Ctrl + C or something similar?

Any help is very helpful and i want to thank you for your time in advance.

UPDATE
I tried to flash a BIOS update, and that worked. So maybe something went wrong while flashing the OS's and I am going to look into that again.

M.Wagner
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  • Have you tested the hardware to make sure it's not bad? Could be CPU issues, bad RAM, badly flashed firmware, etc. Aside from that, just install an OS using another machine and then swap the drive back into this one. However, I don't expect that to work if it won't boot off of anything else. The most important question: Has this machine ever worked for you, or did you just get it? If you just got it, you might be the owner of a brick with a BIOS. – Spooler Feb 13 '18 at 20:06
  • I have not tested it specifically but CPU and RAM gets detected just fine and completely. For me it also has never worked, I purchased it from a shop , they claim, that they tested it before shipping and it worked flawlessly. – M.Wagner Feb 13 '18 at 20:10
  • Detecting is one thing, running a test is another. – Spooler Feb 13 '18 at 20:11
  • What do you mean by testing? Like swapping the RAM around and starting with a single stick? Or testing it in a different machine? – M.Wagner Feb 13 '18 at 20:13
  • No like running a RAM test with Memtest86+ or a CPU test with the built in BIOS burn-in tools. Attempting to boot memtest86+ will be a pretty good indicator if it can boot anything at all. – Spooler Feb 13 '18 at 20:14
  • Ok, so please be patient with me since I am not an expert at all... i got the Memtest86+ on a usb drive and tried to boot it. It got exactly as far as before, shown in the pictures. I also looked through the BIOS settings but I cant find anything for testing the CPU. btw thank you so much for your help – M.Wagner Feb 13 '18 at 20:27
  • I think you have a busted server there. Probably got damaged somehow in shipping or had a bad firmware update. Either way, I hope you can send it back. – Spooler Feb 13 '18 at 20:40
  • Well thank you for your suggestions, I am gonna get in touch with the seller and see what i can do. – M.Wagner Feb 13 '18 at 20:42

1 Answers1

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So I finally figured out what went wrong.
After I was able to flash a new BIOS I got confused and looked into how to flash a proper bootable USB stick again (Yes it is a dumb mistake).

Turns out, that something was not right with the sticks I created but thanks to this article and the Rufus software I was able to finally install the OS.

M.Wagner
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