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T3500 wont boot

astranger200
By astranger200
in Servers, NAS, and Home Lab
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Hi all, so I recently bought a couple of t3500 dell workstations at an auction for like 10 bucks a piece with no ram or drives ect, and I can get them both to post just fine but for some reason they will not boot. I've tried booting off of a windows USB and also off of a drive that already has windows and it passes post and hangs there with the flashing underscore. I've tried turning off fast boot and making sure that the right boot device is set, and also setting the sata mode to ahci and IDE and it will not boot off either drive. It recognises they are there. Any ideas? 

My rig: r7 1700 @ 3.9/1.35v, 16gb ddr4 3200, assorted rando SSDs, hx 1050, vega 64 1650/1025

MY $75 BUILD https://linustechtips.com/main/topic/576889-the-75-build-log/#comment-7547280

 

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Posted

They may have Dell proprietary Bios. You may need Dell windows .

 

I can not be certain, but this is my belief. Try contacting Dell support and see what they say.

 

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6 hours ago, Zmax said:

They may have Dell proprietary Bios. You may need Dell windows .

 

I can not be certain, but this is my belief. Try contacting Dell support and see what they say.

 

I own 2 T3500's myself and I've never needed a specialized copy of Windows. I installed both a standard copy of Windows 7 and PFSense onto these machines with no problem.

 

Try the USB ports on the back of the machine because I think I had a similar issue. The flashing underscore suggest either it is attempting to boot into one of the HDD's where the bootloader is corrupt, of the boot USB is not configured correctly. The fact that you haven't gotten a Dell error for "no bootable devices found" suggest that it is booting the HDD first.

My Gaming Rig: AMD Ryzen 5600x  |  Corsair H100i GTX  |  ASUS ROG Strix B450-F Gaming  |  32GB Samsung DDR4 3600MHz  |  ASUS RTX 3070 ROG Strix  |  WD Black 240GB NVMe  |  1TB Samsung 850 Pro SSD | 2TB Samsung Enterprise SSD  |  WD Black 1.5TB   |  3x NZXT Aer RGB 140MM  |  Seasonic Focus 750w   |  NZXT H500 Elite   |  Windows 10 Pro

 

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Posted

i have the comsumer version of that one and it doesn't like USB booting.

USB booting was more common in 2009 onwards, this unit is from 2006 i think

and optical media basic installer would be better for this.... (windows on a CD/DVD)

i understand if that isn't to your liking but windows didn't support USB booting officially until 8, let alone XP!

*Insert Witty Signature here*

System Config: https://au.pcpartpicker.com/list/Tncs9N

 

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