Booting headless? (no GPU)

[porina]

Very short version:

NAS has 12100F so no iGPU. Mobo PRIME H610M-K D4

Mobo has two PCIe slots. I need a SATA card for more ports, and had a GPU in the other slot (not used for anything). Today I tried to add a 2.5G NIC in place of the dGPU. No boot. Because it is headless I can't see what is going on. I know I have booted this headless in the past, but with different configuration.

 

I've tried swapping both PCIe cards around, and also swapping the NIC with another system to make sure that wasn't faulty. I also tried connecting to the PC by mobo NIC, no change.

 

Any ideas?

 

I'm about to put the GPU back in with the NIC to make sure it is picked up and can be seen over network. But I still still need to get the extra SATA port at some point. Worst case I can delay that since I'm not running any form of RAID on this NAS (purely for backups) so I can live with going down a drive short term while I figure this out.

[leclod]

(A pity you got an F)

(I'd lend my cpu) 

You might fix it with the last try, you might find the solution by trying the NIC card with the gpu

[Needfuldoer]

Are you using the M.2 slot for anything? They make SATA controllers in that form factor.

[porina]

21 minutes ago, leclod said:

(A pity you got an F)

It was all I needed when I bought it, and the non-F version was much more expensive. It's changed in use since then.

 

16 minutes ago, Needfuldoer said:

Are you using the M.2 slot for anything? They make SATA controllers in that form factor.

I considered this and it may be an option if I can't find another solution. I'm looking to avoid extra spending if I can help it.

[OddOod]

Oooof, I know some BIOS' will have a setting you can toggle to let it boot headless, but I have no experience with your particular machine. 
Also, if the battery dies or the BIOS resets itself for whatever reason, you have to put the dGPU back in and change the setting again.
You might be able to contact ASUS and ask for a headless capable BIOS, but who knows if they even make them

This reddit thread has some ideas

But ultimately you might have to replace the brains of the operation

[porina]

1 minute ago, OddOod said:

Oooof, I know some BIOS' will have a setting you can toggle to let it boot headless, but I have no experience with your particular machine. 

Been distracted with other things so not got around to putting the dGPU back in it yet but will have another look in the bios while I'm there. I'm pretty sure I have booted it before without a GPU installed, although now I think about it, does Windows still give it a virtual display since I use VNC at the time?

 

Unrelated, I want to change another setting, and I could do a ram upgrade as I have spare ram lying around so I might revert it back to Windows for testing. I kept a spare drive with a dedicated install for that system for this scenario.

[porina]

Not sure what is going on. Current status is:

 

With dGPU + NIC installed, it boots to BIOS. Halt on errors is already disabled. It can see the boot device, but just refuses to boot from it after several attempts. As a random guess, I turned on CSM and it booted. Mobo NIC is not functional (switch port remains dark). PCIe NIC works as expected. Did adding that NIC somehow interfere with the boot process, but I can't see how since it isn't even selected.

 

Next step, take out dGPU again, put in SATA and see if it keeps booting.

 

Edit: doesn't look like it. I noticed the power LED keeps slow flashing when it fails to boot. When it makes it (to BIOS or beyond) it stays lit. Gonna revert to original config while I consider options.

 

Edit: gonna walk away from it for now. My options are:

1. Run it as before with mobo 1 GbE - this NAS is only for backups so not rally performance critical. For sequential transfers we're looking up to 2x slower (HD limit before 2.5GbE). For small files there will be no difference as it is IO bound. Files will be a mix anyway.
2. USB to 2.5 GbE adapter is lowest cost. It seems to be supported.
3. M.2 to SATA adapter is higher cost, more than 2x above.
4. Replace CPU or mobo are even higher cost still so not realistic.

[Levent]

From my own experience, most new machines will not post with secure boot and without csm enabled when there is no graphics card present. I have tried headless W11/W10, proxmox, truenas and all of them worked once I installed an operating system with a graphics card then removed it later on.

 

[porina]

2 minutes ago, Levent said:

From my own experience, most new machines will not post with secure boot and without csm enabled when there is no graphics card present. I have tried headless W11/W10, proxmox, truenas and all of them worked once I installed an operating system with a graphics card then removed it later on.

When the NIC was installed Secure Boot was greyed out and couldn't be selected at all. That's when I tried CSM which got me further but still not without GPU. I might or might not tinker with this more another day but I had enough for now.

[porina]

I got a USB-2.5G adapter. Once I got it working, I now get 2.5G according to iperf3. The files I'm copying at the moment are disk limited below that but I'll look now and then to check when it isn't so disk limited.

 

"once I got it working" means unlike my other Unraid box, just adding a new NIC doesn't make it work. The other install configures multiple NICs as bonded active backup. This box just left the new NIC idle/unconfigured. I copied the settings over and it was fine. This might explain why ports weren't working when it booted previously, but I'm still clueless on why it wouldn't boot in some combinations. It might be this particular install was so old it pre-dated UEFI support so needed CSM, and I forgot about it.

 

Anyway, I consider this done. I failed to get it to boot headless, but with a USB NIC I don't need to remove the GPU any more.