OS Booting issue

[brokebeardedguy]

I've recently picked up 4 (new to me) dell 2950s' two of which are gen 3 running a pair of xeon E5450 and two gen 1 running a pair of xeon 5050.

all of which are a serious upgrade from my current servers of various intel and older powered edge models. all of my current servers do me fin with the exception of streaming some of the newer blue ray content over the network.

my issue is the two gen3 and one of the gen1 servers will allow me to boot any os and install win10, win7, server12, and server08. however I have one that gets stuck at the boot screen. it will open the files.... display with windows logo and right before it loads the installation screen it freezes. The other three units will load whatever I throw in them but this one only boots server03. also seams like the gen3 servers are a lot quieter then the gen1's. any thoughts or help would be greatly appreciated.

 

even for loud servers they are only half as noisy as my older intel and pesc1425 units. plaining to grab a 1366 board down the road and a pair of hex core's possibly for better video streaming. I realize there's many better options out there as far as server components go. but lets face it if I had the money to but some sweet new hardware id have a different username. 

[Electronics Wizardy]

RIP powerbill

 

If just one is having an issues, Id guess bad hardware, probably ram. Run memtest on it for a while, and try removing sticks.

 

[brokebeardedguy]

I've removed all sticks of ram and swapped them into other servers. Still same issue.

are you saying to try and boot it with no ram at all? 

 

my power company loves me. I consume 3 times the amount of juice of others houses my size...

[brokebeardedguy]

So after 3 days of playing around I noticed the BIOS versions on each of the servers were different I tried flashing to the newest version with no luck with the exception of both Gen1s' no longer accepting anything other than server 03. I roll back to an original bios version 1.3 instead of to 2.7 the system will now accept any operating system I throw at it.

 

I've never had an older bios work better but it's fixed!!