Hey everyone, I was just trying to boot a NAS that I built a long time ago.
I remember a few years ago I have booted it into the FreeNAS installation setup, but never finished it because I didn’t have enough hard drives.
Now after a few years of not touching it, I got some new hard drives, so I plugged the NAS in again and turned it on, but for some strange reason I can’t even get into the BIOS. It’s not like the screen is black or I get error codes, it just displays this message indefinitely:
The same thing happens if I remove either of the RAM sticks.
If I remove both RAM sticks the screen remains black and I just hear a beeping error sound as you would expect.
I also unplugged the HDDs to make sure it not a power draw issue.
I see some hardware jumpers on the board, might be something to look into, also dead hard drives can cause bios hangs sometimes but you unplugged all of them, try reseting bios band looking into the jumpers
I used the Clear RTC RAM (CLRTC1) jumper to clear the Real Time Clock (RTC) RAM in CMOS as described in the manual.
No change - still gets stuck in pre-BIOS.
Then I used the ME firmware force recovery setting jumper to force Intel Management Engine (ME) boot from recovery.
But again, nothing seems to have changed - I still get stuck on the same pre-BIOS screen.
Hmm. Weird that it sits on that splash screen for so long. Assuming you’ve tried furiously spamming F2/delete on boot, but that won’t help if you can’t even get to the motherboard bios splash screen…
Try loading up the latest bios for the board onto a USB, and booting with that in. Could be corrupt, and it should automatically flash from whatever’s on the USB. Would unplug the other drives while it does that. No reason it shouldn’t boot without them.
I don’t understand how updating the BIOS would work.
In the manual it says to create a bootable USB flash drive and then copy BUPDATER.EXE and i[filename].CAP to the USB drive.
But how do you create a blank bootable USB flash drive?
I’ve only done this with img or iso files before.
And then it says to Boot the system in DOS mode which is a term I’ve never heard before.
I just set the jumper to disable the onboard GPU just to see what happens and I get the following beeping code:
1x long beep, 8x short beep, pause, 1x short beep
A quick google search tells me 1x long + 8x short means “video adapter test failed”. So I guess doing anything without a GPU is not possible.
After resetting the jumper to enable the onboard again, I’m back to no error codes and the am still stuck on the same screen as before.
I have also tried removing the CPU and see what happens when you try to turn it on without it, but without the CPU it didn’t turn on at all, so I put it back in there. Still stuck in the pre-BIOS screen.
Btw what is this screen even called? It that a power on self test for the GPU or something?
Looks like they are asking you to make a USB which has DOS on it, and add the bios files to the USB.
But if the system is not showing the bios screen, it might not get to the USB boot screen anyway.
So I don’t think it is the solution you need, but you can try using an app like RUFUS, or one of the others, as described Here and after USB is made, before ejecting it, copy the bios files to the new USB.
Then If you can boot into DOS from the USB, then you might be able to run the exe app suggested by the manufacturer
The USB thing on the left is an SPI flasher that I could use if I can figure out how to get/extract the raw BIOS image that would have to go on the chip.
The thing in the middle I’ve never used before, but I just plugged the PSU’s 24pin connector into it and only the 5VSB LED lit up.
But I guess that could either be because the tester is broken or because the PSU is an external brick that directly plugs into the Motherboard through a proprietary connector.
The card on the left I have never used before either, but it didn’t seem to work. The tiny display didn’t lit up and I got a beeping error indicating a GPU issue (long, short, short) which only occurred while the card was plugged in.
That board has the EZ Flash utility built in, which should’ve automagically done it without any user input. You don’t need a bootable DOS image for it to work.
I’d assume the Aspeed vBIOS would update with the mainboard one, and that the board would check for an EZ Flash compatible USB before booting the onboard VGA, but I guess that’s not the case if you tried booting with a blank (no DOS image, just formatted) USB with the BIOS file on it, and leaving it to do its thing?
I’m out of ideas for now. Hopefully having the onboard graphics disabled should allow you access into the main BIOS to enable headless booting, if that’s an option.
Just got the graphics card and realized that my case has no slot for extension cards, so I had to unscrew the motherboard and hold it up at an angle so that I can put the card in.
It didn’t seem to even notice the existence of the card. Nothing changed. Output was still on the onboard DVI port, not on the dedicated graphics card. Switching the jumper to disable the onboard GPU resulted in the “no gpu found” beeping error that I have gotten before after switching the jumper.
…
After a while I must have turned the NAS on without the DVI cable plugged in and for the first time in aged I heard the normal single beep that I used to get when everything worked just fine and sure enough plugging in the DVI cable showed I was in the BIOS now!!!
I repeated this over and over again and I can say with certainty: It only gets to the BIOS when I don’t have a monitor connected.
Any ideas how to fix that so that I don’t have to disconnect the cable before rebooting every time?
… I haven’t gotten my new BIOS chip yet btw, but I suppose I won’t need it anymore.
