HP D530 Startup Error: 512 - Chassis fan not detected

Question

I'm using the HP D530 Motherboard/CPU that I installed in a new case with a 600W PSU.

There was a problem with the onboard chassis fan connector (3-wire) not supplying sufficient power to the chassis fan indicated by the fan spinning very slowly, but I never experienced the "512 Error" at boot. Also, the same fan works perfectly connected directly to the PSU.

I disconnected it since I already have plenty of fans connected via the PSU directly. Since then, on startup, I get the error: "512 - Chassis Fan Not Detected" and am asked to "Press F1 to continue". This gets quite annoying since I use this machine remotely (w/ FreeNAS).

What could be causing the onboard fan connector to not be giving enough power? If this is unable to be corrected, how can I make the BIOS think there's a chassis fan plugged in without actually plugging a fan into the onboard connector? Would it be possible to jumper the pins without damaging the motherboard or PSU?

Answer 1

Often some of the motherboard headers are temperature-controlled. This is a desired feature, you just need to go to BIOS settings and define the speed:temp-curve, ie. define what speeds fan should take at what temperatures. Often you can also just make the fan run at full speed all the time, if noise is not a concern.

You can also use wiring where fan gets power from PSU (at full 12 volts) and sends signal about rotation speed to motherboard header. There are this kind of adapters readily available, many fans ship with one. The key is to connect the red and black wires of the fan (+12V and ground) to the PSU and then the yellow wire (rpm signal) to MB header.

Answer 2

Nothing you described indicated anything was wrong. You created a problem where none existed by removing the fan from the header that was properly managing it. The fan was spinning slowly because it didn't need to spin quickly. As the error message indicates, the system was managing and monitoring the fan properly.

Answer 3

I plugged a case fan into the plug located near the pci slots, screwed the 3 wire fan into the back of the case and my chassis fan and f1 boot were gone.

Answer 4

What case did you use? Just a stock ATX or was it something special? I have a d530 SFF in the original case that I've modded and maxed out.

I did try to put another HD in, pulling out the floppy. Was a sad story, kept getting random crashes and reboots. Evidently with a full 4 GiB of memory, a Compaq USB/Firewire PCI card and a GeForce 6200 with 256MB in the AGP slot, the puny 185 watt PSU was just too anemic to run. I can see why you wanted to get a bigger PSU.

I wound up taking both SATA connectors out to case mods and hooking up eSATA drives. I also have 1-2 USB drives and a Firewire drive or two hanging off the back side. I can mount almost 4 terabytes of disk storage, but usually only spin about 3.2 TiB. (I have these spurts of doing a lot of video editing.)

At any rate, I might be concerned about the setup on your Mobo, in that you want to make sure that the PSU is well balanced between the case, devices and the motherboard. One of the jerk-wagons at the office did something like your replacement, and wound up having to replace the mobo because somehow he got the PSU out of balance, it overheated and during that process, fried the motherboard.

But, if you say that you're having no problems, could you drop your case, PSU and other goodies on us? I might want to consider the same strategy, real soon now.

Answer 5

Open BIOS settings. How you do this is dependent on what type of motherboard you use.

Try F2 or Del. When you boot your PC, hold one of these buttons, then you will get to a blue screen with a lot of settings. Just look around the settings that I already explained to solve your problem.

I will try to search some pictures for you, showing how to do it.