Trying to bring an older SuperMicro server back to life. Its special 3-legged power cord disappeared five years ago when the movers packed it in an obscure box. I finally found it a couple of months ago. Lots of nagging stumbles after hitting the Power On button. I no longer have a VGA monitor, so I had to find an adapter between the server's DVI port and my HDMI monitor. Then I discovered that the server is too old to understand USB keyboards and mice, so I had to find PS2 versions of each to make primitive BIOS settings. Finally, I got it to boot as far as the Fedora 23 GRUB menu. The default pick resulted in an EDD error (????). Since I couldn't get around that, I burned a Live DVD for Fedora 31 MATE and booted from that. With that I get the DVD's GRUB menu, but no farther. Any of the selections will end in a "Kernel is not a valid ELF file" error. (I've burned two DVDs just to be sure it wasn't a bad disc.) This server has an old dual Opteron EATX motherboard with 32GB of RAM. The server has ten 300GB SCSI (not SAS) hard drives that formed a 2TB ZFS filesystem. By setting aside 16GB of motherboard RAM for use by the OS, the other 16GB served beautifully as a deduplication cache for ZFS. I've done a Google search for the subject error message, and the few answers I get seem to say there's a memory problem. I'd love to run MEMTEST86, but I can't seem to get there from here. Any ideas? --Doc
|