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I have been a bit obsessed with PCs since my parents bought me my first PC, a 386DX with 4MB of memory, almost 30 years ago. Recently one of my friend was selling his crypto mining rig, and I bought the essential parts to start building a new server:
- Mother board: ASUS Rampage V Extreme
- CPU: Intel Xeon E5 2670(12-core, 24-thread)
- Memory: DDR4 16GB x 4
- PSU: 1000W 80+ Platinum
I bought a new fan for the CPU, still have a spare Samsung NVME SSD and an AMD 6600XT graphics card. Also I sourced a 2nd-hard PC case from Gumtree and it turns out to be very big 🙂
After carefully assembled together, I turned on the beast however the screen didn’t light up. I had a look at the LED code and it stayed at A2, and the the diagnostics LEDs were like this
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So, something wrong with the graphics card and the SSD drive? I’m certain the 6600XT was in good working order and the SSD was taken out from a laptop not long ago so it should be Ok too. And since it’s a blank screen I couldn’t even enter the BIOS to see what’s wrong. I tried to switch the graphics card to the second PCI-E slot, and a different SSD but still got stuck at A2. I was really confused and thought those LEDs might be misleading.
Fast-forward, I tried a lot of different combination until my friend asked if I was using a DisplayPort(DP) cable to connect the monitor, because in some situation the BIOS can only show up via HDMI. Indeed it was a DP cable! Luckily my monitor has both DP and HDMI ports. So after I connected the monitor with HDMI the screen lighted up!
After all, the LEDs were accurate:
- The VGA LED stated that DP was not supported during BIOS POST
- The BOOT_DEVICE LED stated that I don’t have a working Windows system installed
But everyone knows that I wouldn’t install a Windows system to this beast, actually the SSD already has Fedora Linux installed when it’s used on a laptop and I expected it to just work on this PC because Linux doesn’t care about product keys and activation stuff.
To enable EFI boot for Linux systems, I did need to change this setting in BIOS to Other OS
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And voila!
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🙂