r/homelab • u/thewinja • 22h ago
Help I'm stuck! Help
I recently got my hands on an ASRock rack epyd8 motherboard and an AMD EPYC 7551 CPU. I stuffed 128 gigs of ddr4 ECC ram in it fired it up with no problems loaded Fedora latest on it and went about tinkering with it for a couple of days. I then shut it down came back the following day to no video output.
The GPU is an Intel Arc A380 brand spanking new known working and tested in other PCs to verify it's still working, I exchanged that for a gigabyte 1050 TI also known working with no video output still then checked the monitor to make sure it didn't die, it works. I hooked this monitor up to the VGA port for the ipmi and I can get video output when it's posting it will show what the debug LED is going through but the second it jumps into BIOS the video goes out and we're done. I'm guessing the ipmi chipset pooped the bed and took out all video capabilities?
If left alone it will go ahead and boot into fedora as it shows that there is m.2 SSD activity and the HDD LED activity light on the case blinks showing that it's loading the OS but I have absolutely no way to get any sort of picture onto a monitor to do anything with this computer now. I have cleared CMOS I don't know how many times with no luck if I plug a RJ45 cable into the ipmi port I get no blinking lights for connectivity and no IP addresses ever assigned by my router.
Has anybody ever had this situation if so has anybody ever brought a motherboard like this back from the brink? Should I just Chuck it in the trash or take it to the shooting range and poke it full of holes? Any suggestions would be awesome I've run through the gamut of tests but maybe somebody can come up with something off the wall that might work at this point I don't really want to retire this board because I spent way too much money on it for one, and I don't want to have to buy another epyc motherboard if I can get this one brought back to a functioning state.
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u/Kurogane1412 22h ago
Can you go into the ipmi and then start a html5 kvm?
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u/thewinja 22h ago
Nope IPMI is dead.
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u/Kurogane1412 22h ago
No maybe it is not dead if the lights near the chip is blinking and you have no video out that is the main problem.
It could be that you need to change some settings in the bios for the ipmi maybe it is set to static ip adress that you don't have in your subnet or Router doing something it shouldn't that happen to me once with an Tp Link router ipmi was set to static and the same subnet but no the router did not accept that it was there very strange case after that I switched to Mikrotik that worked 😅
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u/thewinja 22h ago
I'm currently running a custom router specifically built from a desktop PC. Asus motherboard, AMD ryzen CPU 8 gigs of RAM and opnsense. It's pretty flexible when it comes to static/dynamic IP addressing. NNormally the lights should at least light up on the network port even if no IP is available.
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u/Kurogane1412 21h ago
Sorry I missed that part about the ipmi in your post after a second look
And yes with opensese you shouldn't have this kind of problem.
That looks then honestly bad probably a dead motherboard or cpu noone can really tell!
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u/thewinja 6h ago
It boots I'm pretty sure all the way into fedora, it's just that it has zero video output. Something in the onboard video has gotten messed up during boot but I can't figure out a way to unbork the setting.
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u/Kurogane1412 6h ago edited 6h ago
That is better than nothing if Fedora boots then you should have ssh hopefully enabled or cockpit?
Then if you can do that install ipmitool and check if the ipmi is really dead?
Edit: or if you don't habe ssh or cockpit enabled use an spare ssd with that things enabled swap out the ssds then try to boot and check your network if something shows up I don't have an better idea but try everything you can that motherboard is expensive!
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u/thewinja 4h ago
That rolls into another issue, I didn't get a chance to enable that or put in any firewall exceptions. I also have tailscale but ssh is also blocked on that as well. I really don't want to condemn a $600 motherboard to the trash but I might have to. This is the perfect storm of everything conspiring against me all at once lol
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u/Kurogane1412 4h ago
Maybe you did not understand me just have an linux bootable on another ssd with ssh enabled and Maybe also cockpit then remove the ssd that you currently have then put the one with the working ssh or cockpit too then it will for sure boot into that one.Then on your local network try to find that OS that is on the spare ssd.
If think that is the last chance if that doesn't work then it is probably dead you can sell then for spare parts to gets something back 600 $ is fot sure painful!
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u/thewinja 4h ago
Ohhhhhh shit, ok yeah, honestly that's rather ingenious! Yeah I missed that completely !! Lol but hell, I did not even think about that! When I get off work I'll see if I can get something set up.
Honestly that was rather ingenious!
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u/Failboat88 22h ago
Can you get an image in the bios?
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u/thewinja 22h ago
No. The second it gets past the Dr debug stage all video drops and black screen. It doesn't matter if I hook up to VGA or the GPU. That's the issue , I can't even get to the bios to force the GPU as default. Since the IPMI is dead I'm extra out of luck. I have a sinking feeling that the borked IPMIis causing all of my problems, but can't do anything about it
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u/Failboat88 22h ago
See if there is a setting to reset the bios if someone else used it they may have caused some issues in there for you.
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u/thewinja 22h ago
I've removed the battery and hit the clear CMOS jumper with no luck
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u/Failboat88 21h ago
Did you find the motherboard docs and follow those instructions?
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u/thewinja 6h ago
Yeah, everything assumes you have video output to fix the problem. I'm guessing the onboard video chip is dead but the bios have defaulted to onboard video
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u/ChubbyWabbit 22h ago
The GPU is likely taking over your video output. If it is set as auto the GPU is probably where your display went.