s2600cp Corrupt Display issues at boot and unable to boot without bios reset

[KMcMi2]

s2600cp, xeon e5-2620, 32gb pc1333 ecc ram, chassis P4308XXMHDN, single 460W power supply, SERVER 2012, intel raid card with 4 1tb hard drives in raid 5, and 2 raid 1 ssd for OS

My S2600cp has been experiencing odd issues that I thought at first were related to my rs2wc080 as the OS would just die without any warning and no log files being created in windows and it did this about twice a day for the past few days. The screen would simply be black with a single white cursor at the bottom left of the screen. But now I'm wondering if it's not a motherboard issue. As when testing the card out, cleaning and reapplying thermal paste to the heat sink and restarting I found I would often be presented with garbled video output at either a letter or two of the bios info would be oscillating or I would be greeted by a completely garbled blocky colour screen. The only way I can get it to fully boot is to reset the bios each time and this would clear up the video issues.

I have updated to the latest bios, reset to default values then set only what I needed for the raid card to boot and confirmed that the Bios, ME and BMC are all up to the latest versions. But each time I reboot I get this corrupted video issue and cant fully boot.

Does anyone have suggestions as to what might be the issue? I have attached the intel scan logs here as well. Should I be looking for a new motherboard, or entire server sooner than later?

[idata · Accepted solution]

Hello ambient,

Let me ask you if the corrupted video signal started before or after the BIOS update. I am thinking about two possible causes.1. a corrupted BIOS installation in which case you could try the BIOS recovery process and then do a BIOS update again. Follow the steps on page 102 from the following document: https://www.intel.com/content/dam/support/us/en/documents/motherboards/server/s2600cp/sb/g26942005_s2600cp_p4000cp_tps_rev19.pdf https://www.intel.com/content/dam/support/us/en/documents/motherboards/server/s2600cp/sb/g26942005_s2600cp_p4000cp_tps_rev19.pdf2. a failed or damaged VGA port but as you say the issue will go away after a BIOS reset then I don't think this is the actual reason.Please keep me updated.RegardsJose H.

[KMcMi2]

No the video issue happened before the bios update. I tried the bios update to remedy the issue. And I don't think it could be the port as it does work fine once I reset the bios and startup. I am planning on pulling the Raid controller and put in a standard drive just to see if the boot issue still happens as the earlier crashes I was experiencing seemed related to the raid card itself crashing but since I re did the thermal paste all seems to be good with that side(fingers crossed). Thinking back, I knoow we did have 3 rather large power brown outs a day or two before all this stated to happen. I do have a APC Smart UPS powering the system so THOUGHT it would be isolated and it never did go down with the power fluctuated. I did not have the APC monitoring software running at the time.

[idata]

Hi ambient,

Have you reinstalled the BIOS update? You could try to follow the BIOS recovery procedure detailed on the document previously attached?Besides that could you please provide the board markings (serial number, PBA number)? This in case this turns out to be a hardware issue.RegardsJose H.

[KMcMi2]

Well it took several tires to get t he computer to boot without video issues but finally got the recovery bios to run and i have shut down and restarted several times now and its worked each time since so fingers crossed.

Thank you Jose for your help

[idata]

That's great news.

I will keep the thread open for a couple days in case you have updates. After that I will mark it as resolved.Regards