Hi,

After about 5 months finally all of the parts for my DIY WHS have arrived(the total for the thing is $1600) I will put it together on my birthday on wensday. my question is this I have a Gigabyte GA-EP45-UD3P motherbord, after I install
and configure WHS I would like to remove the keyboard and monitor and have it run headless.However I am concerned the thing will not boot with out them, can someoneplease let met know how to set this up in the bios.


Regards,
Don

There should be no need to adjust the bios. It should boot fine without them. In fact, you want to be able to plug those in down the road and use them if you had issues requiring access during bootup (i.e. change bios).

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HP MSS EX490 with Intel E6300
4 GB RAM
7 TB Drive Storage

MediaSmartServer.net Wiki, it's loaded with helpful information about WHS and the HP MediaSmart Server.

Once you get your machine up and running, you can do everything from the console or from an RDP session, including reboots.

This article actually tells you to change the BIOS settings to run headless (see step #9)

http://www.homeserverhacks.com/2008/04/ ... erver.html

I have a spare keyboard/mouse/monitor hooked up to my DIY WHS, but was curious if I would need to make this change in the BIOS as well once I finally go headless.

_________________
Cheers,
Damian

DIY WHS - 12.5TB and growing, too many gadgets to list

Did you read the MediaSmartServer blog today?
Blog - http://www.adigitalhomeblog.com
"Like a midget at a urinal, stay on your toes!" - Lieutenant Frank Drebin

I have built quite a few DIY Servers and never changed anything in the bios, because I want to be able to attach keyboard/mouse/display at any time to debug any issues that crop up. I don't think you will have any problems just leaving things as they are and booting without the keyboard/mouse/display.

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HP EX470, 4 GIG, 4200+ EE SFF, WHS V1, Production
HP EX485, 4 GIG, E5800, WHS 2011, Stablebit Drive Pool, Transfer Server, Backup Server
HP EX490, 4 GIG, Q9400S, WHS 2011, Stablebit Drive Pool, Mediaserver
HP EX485, 4 GIG, Q8200S, WHS 2011, ITUNES Server

I haven't changed anything in the bios in Andromeda. Now that I've solved my problem with the MV8s, I only access Andromeda via RDP, and haven't had any problems not using the monitor and keyboard.

On my previous DIY server that I had running for over a year I never had a problem with reboots and I had no monitor/keyboard/display attached. Only attached them if I had to troubleshoot a problem, which was very rare.

I, too, made no BIOS changes to run a DIY WHS "headless" in the past. My test machine currently has KMD attached but powered off and it, too, has no problems. (And I have disconnected them as well without problems.)

I had never heard of making a BIOS change for this prior to reading this thread, but it does make some sense should an error be encountered! But with KMD available having it actually halt may be a better choice. (In my case I would just turn on the power to see the problem!)

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....JBick

EX475, 2 GB, LE-1640
PC1: Vista-->W7 Ultimate/32, (D-Drive RAID-5 Array)
PC2: Lenovo Laptop, Win XP Home SP3
2xLinksys WRT54G v1.1 and 2xNetGear GS105 Gbit switch

Just built my own WHS box too. Cut off it's "head" & hooked it into my network. It shows up on the network, but I can't console into it. While I'm still checking this out, I can't help but wonder if it's not a side-effect from going headless. When I was setting it up, it always asked me to hit ctrl-alt-del when booting up... how does that work when headless?? Is the OS smart enough to recognize it is headless & no longer asks for that?

Andromeda always asks for the ctrl-alt-del when I'm working on it directly, but when I RDP into it from my PC, I don't get the ctrl-alt-del request. Your DIY will show up on your network, but in order to run the console from your PC you must connect the PC to the DIY via the Connector. And you can only connect the PC to one WHS machine at a time.

Figured it out. Seems it didn't like being hooked up to a router that was hooked up to a router that was hooked up to a router.

Looking forward to learning about WHS.
Thanks

I suppose it depends on the MB. Just make sure Halt in the BIOS is set to never halt for any "error." Keyboard error etc.

When it's headless you connect via remote desktop so you will never get that message. That's only for people logging in with a keyboard onto the actual machine.