Issues with a W2100z
So on Monday the two new W2100z servers arrived. Since these are Microsoft WHQL certified, i figured that actually installing Windows on this server was a no brainer.

Wrong.

This server comes with a 52x combo drive, and that's it for removable media. One of the neat things about the W2100z is that is has dual onboard SCSI bus. The only hard drive that ships with the server is a SCSI drive, and there is no OS preloaded on the server. (No OS preloaded is not really a problem because I have never actually used the preloaded solaris instance before.)

I got all the goodies out of the boxes, wired it all up (ordered with the spiffy 19inch LCD panel - before you get all excited this is for trade shows) but was disappointed to see it promptly do nothing (more on that later)...

On this "wiring it up" - I plugged power cable into the power supply and the computer just started POSTing. There is no power button on the back side of the system - only one small recessed hard to press button on the front, and for some reason it seemed that mashing that button did nothing.

Later on in the night I stumbed on a BIOS setting called something like "power fail resume action", where you could choose how the system should act when power is restored. There are three choices:

Resume Last State [default]
Leave Off
Power On

Believing this to be the root of my power switch problems, I changed this setting from resume Last State to Leave Off. Well, the system won't power back on now.

All For now.
-jason
- posted by Jason @ 7:09 PM