Hello everybody. After a few days of scouring the Internet (and these forums in particular), I still cannot get my PowerEdge 2650 to boot from a CD. Hoping theflash1932 will drop by, s/he seems very knowledgeable.. ;)
Full disclosure: I've been given 3 Dell Poweredge2650s to try and bring back from the dead. They were all scored second-hand, so they may not be in any sort of running shape, but so far I can't even get them to boot from a CD. I have never worked with servers before, but I have pretty extensive knowledge of PC building and repair. I have tried to boot two out of the three 2650s with a plethora of CDs: a legit Windows Server 2003 CD, the Dell SBUU, a Linux Live CD, a Sardu Disk.. nothin'. With each server, I hot-swapped out the CD-ROM/Floppy combo with the others, so a total of three different CD-ROM/Floppy combos have been tried on two of the servers.
I find it highly unlikely that all three of these drive combos are dead. They light up during boot, so I know they're getting power, but I still find myself getting the "No bootable device" error on boot after successful BIOS installation. I have ensured that the CD-ROM drive is present, selected, and first in the boot device order. I have tried with OS Install mode On and Off, and in the RAID configuration utility there is an option for CD-ROM Boot that is disabled by default that I have also tried enabling and disabling again.
At this point, I feel like I must be missing something very basic. Is there some special process that I need to take to ensure that the PE2650 will boot from CD?
-Aaron
EDIT: The server has two 136GB Seagate drives in it that are configured for RAID 1 and have been fully scrubbed if this makes a difference.