Howdy all!
I went thrift-shopping a couple of weeks back and found an EX470. It came without hard drives, or any documentation, but for $10 I thought it was worth a gamble!
Unfortunately it's not just as easy as plugging it in and going. Seems there's something funky going on with the unit. The power button on the back turns the unit on, but does not turn power the server off. The recessed button on the front doesn't get the server into recovery mode, or have any effect at all from the troubleshooting I've done. I read through some forum posts and someone else was well-served by replacing the CR3032 battery on the mobo. I gave that a chance but don't see any difference. I do notice though that the RAM installed on the unit appears to be aftermarket, 2GB of G.SKILL RAM which was a nice surprise. I haven't bothered checking to see if the processor was upgraded or not though.
The health indicator goes straight from blue to violet after a second or two of booting when no drive is connected. When I connect a spare drive the health indicator stays off, but flickers on every 30 seconds or so, flashing violet every so often. The LAN light on front does at least let me know when I'm connected though, so that seems like some sigh of life. Also, when I connect an Ethernet cable from my PC to the server, the indicators on back are green and amber, rather than the amber and orange lights I get when connecting it to my router. So it can at least tell the difference between the two, which is kind of neat.
Well, after spending hours of getting nowhere I decided to take the plunge and buy a VGA adapter for the server so I could see what was going on with the BIOS. Unfortunately, that hasn't exactly gotten me any further. The monitor detects that something is connected, and isn't receiving a signal, so it puts itself into power-save mode. So I still don't seem to have a view into what's happening.
I'm still interested in trying to resurrect this guy though. I'm kind of attached, plus the prospect of having a little server NAS device for long-term storage would be really awesome.
I think I read somewhere about flashing bios using a flash drive? But I can't seem to find it now, and would rather avoid doing anything like that without some solid guidance.
Any guidance you guys could provide would be very much appreciated.
edit: So while waiting to hear back I decided to go ahead and see what this little machine had under the hood. It's an AMD Sempron SDH1150IAA3DE. I decided to cross-reference against the thread here:
viewtopic.php?f=2&t=12176The processor inside does not appear to be stock, but it also doesn't appear to be one of the confirmed working units either. Seems odd that it's none of the above. Could
this be my problem?? O_o
edit 2found a stock CPU on ebay for $4 shipped, for that price I may as well give it a shot. If I don't hear back with other suggestions I'll update this thread with the results in a week or so.
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