Server died, any thoughts?

Woke up this morning to see my DL380 G9 dead, no lights or anything, no iLO.

Removed and replaced all the power cables, it flashes all 4 lights and iLO is back, but shows the error message above.

Replaced the button cell battery, (was 2.9V) with a new one at 3.2V, no change.

Tried resetting the NVRAM using the system mainteance switches, still no luck.

Anyone have any experience with this?

 

It from the fault codes looks like it popped a fuse

 

I don't think that's a fuse in the traditional 'melting wire' sense, it's an IC that monitors current, voltage, etc. and shuts things off if something goes out of range.

Best starting point is probably too strip the machine back to the bare bones (no expansion cards, single PSU, single CPU, minimum ram sticks, disconnect the backplane, etc.) and see if it still complains

 

Yep, tried with no drives, 1 CPU (swapped both CPUs to slot 1 individually) and minimal RAM, still no improvement

Wondering if the lightning last night in Sydney killed it, but it's behind a good rackmount eaton UPS so it shouldn't have.

I do have 1 PCI card in there, an interface ot the two SSD boot SSDs, I'll see if I can get it to boot without that

 

Sounds like an onboard System/Mainboard component failure, no ILO doesn't help either.
I'm guessing she has a few years under her belt?

 

Yeah EFUSE is a power regulation circuit... may have tripped due to a short circuit, failed component, overcurrent/voltage. Going to be difficult to isolate

Any option to swap power supplies? Better inspect the board for visible damage...



JSmith

 

Tried turning it off and on again?

 

It has dual PSUs. I've tried each individually.

All the reading seems to be related to power to the PCI socket, because mostly people run into this problem when trying to install a beefy GPU. I have none of that.

I'm going to pull it out of the rack properly this afternoon and see if I can see any damage

 

What about the backplane? There is quite a bit of power management stuff on those to handle hot swaps and such.

That seems plausible. Surge suppressors can only do so much, and unless you have a double conversion UPS you're feeding whatever comes in on the mains wiring into your system until it has time to recognise a fault and respond to it.

 

With the backplane and PCI disconnected it will POST!

Now to start plugging bit back in to hopefully isolate which one is causing it

 

Backplane it is it seems

 

Lodge warranty fault, await replacement.

 

Well out of warranty unfortunately.

Found that there are two sides to the backplane board, each with their own power connector.

Side '2' with drives 7-12 works fine, but there is a dead short between GND and 12V on side '1' (drives 1-6)

 

That's not very business or enterprisey of you .

 

probably stupid question but was there any magic smoke ? whether you can smell it now, or a cctv camera saw it ?

 

Nope, the efuse shut it all down before any magic smoke got released, which is great for not starting a fire, but makes diagnosis more difficult!

 

After a bit of fault finding and repair, I now have my server up and running again!

I do have a dead hard drive now though, but I'm not sure if that's correlated.