I have a DS3611xs which was powered off for quite sometime and upon powering on came up with a feared blinking blue led. This led to an extended troubleshooting with the following results:
1. The original state was that as soon as the power supply came on, the cpu cooling fan would spin up and then stop, and the restart in a loop. Hypothesis - possible hardware issue due to length of time in inactive state. Pulled memory, disk, the usual, etc - behavior unchanged. Pulled cpu, reinstall - behavior unchanged. Cleaned board, replaced CMOS battery - no change.
2. searched for full bios firmware to download but none found. Only the firmware in .PAT files but it is only the UEFI portion, not the full bios.
3. Unsoldered the eeprom and fitted a temp adapter so I could swap eeproms easily. eeprom readable and made backup copy. Looked at bios backup with UEFItool but didn't see any signs of obvious corruption so possibly just some parameters were corrupt.
4. Created a bios based on coreboot and it would execute until running into a problem initializing vga (onboard).
5. With partial coreboot checked some voltages on board to see any evident vcore voltage faults. None found.
6. Inserted a pci video card and coreboot could initialize properly and show either seabios or grub. Would seem to indicate that motherboard is OK from hardware perspective.
7. Found a working bios file for RS3412xs which is basically the same as DS3611xs except without riser card due to rack format. With this bios as is, DS3611xs starts but stays in blinking blue. No output on serial nor vga port. Can't tell if eDOM flash has a problem.
8. Pulled eDOM and a backup was made. It was readable at a good speed, less than a minute. Found a USB key drive that I can reconfigure PID/VID so this is something else that can be done.
9. Created new bios by taking the RS3412xs Intel region (non UEFI portion) and adding the DS3611xs UEFI portion from a .PAT distribution. Still results are unchanged, blinking led and no visibile evidence that it is booting from USB (internal or external).
10. Assuming that bios of above versions is working correctly, but is verifiying against specifics of motherboard (SN, MAC address, etc) and refuses if not found. Not sure how to go about searching in the UEFI portion where to make changes.
On a parallel path -
1. with working coreboot I can get it to boot from a USB that has the Xpenology bootloader, but for the moment it will not recognize a usb keyboard and there is no ps/2 keyboard port so I'm stuck.
So, in summary so far, motherboard hw should be ok. BIOS would be the culprit but without a good DS3611xs it might be impossible to figure out what needs to be customized. A possible hypothesis or approach is the following. If the .PAT file has the UEFI rom that will be used to update, then there is some utility code that has modify it properly to customize for the specific DS3611xs. Maybe something can be reversed engineered from this.
Any suggestions? I feel I'm close to a solution but it is just missing a small step. Thanks.
1. The original state was that as soon as the power supply came on, the cpu cooling fan would spin up and then stop, and the restart in a loop. Hypothesis - possible hardware issue due to length of time in inactive state. Pulled memory, disk, the usual, etc - behavior unchanged. Pulled cpu, reinstall - behavior unchanged. Cleaned board, replaced CMOS battery - no change.
2. searched for full bios firmware to download but none found. Only the firmware in .PAT files but it is only the UEFI portion, not the full bios.
3. Unsoldered the eeprom and fitted a temp adapter so I could swap eeproms easily. eeprom readable and made backup copy. Looked at bios backup with UEFItool but didn't see any signs of obvious corruption so possibly just some parameters were corrupt.
4. Created a bios based on coreboot and it would execute until running into a problem initializing vga (onboard).
5. With partial coreboot checked some voltages on board to see any evident vcore voltage faults. None found.
6. Inserted a pci video card and coreboot could initialize properly and show either seabios or grub. Would seem to indicate that motherboard is OK from hardware perspective.
7. Found a working bios file for RS3412xs which is basically the same as DS3611xs except without riser card due to rack format. With this bios as is, DS3611xs starts but stays in blinking blue. No output on serial nor vga port. Can't tell if eDOM flash has a problem.
8. Pulled eDOM and a backup was made. It was readable at a good speed, less than a minute. Found a USB key drive that I can reconfigure PID/VID so this is something else that can be done.
9. Created new bios by taking the RS3412xs Intel region (non UEFI portion) and adding the DS3611xs UEFI portion from a .PAT distribution. Still results are unchanged, blinking led and no visibile evidence that it is booting from USB (internal or external).
10. Assuming that bios of above versions is working correctly, but is verifiying against specifics of motherboard (SN, MAC address, etc) and refuses if not found. Not sure how to go about searching in the UEFI portion where to make changes.
On a parallel path -
1. with working coreboot I can get it to boot from a USB that has the Xpenology bootloader, but for the moment it will not recognize a usb keyboard and there is no ps/2 keyboard port so I'm stuck.
So, in summary so far, motherboard hw should be ok. BIOS would be the culprit but without a good DS3611xs it might be impossible to figure out what needs to be customized. A possible hypothesis or approach is the following. If the .PAT file has the UEFI rom that will be used to update, then there is some utility code that has modify it properly to customize for the specific DS3611xs. Maybe something can be reversed engineered from this.
Any suggestions? I feel I'm close to a solution but it is just missing a small step. Thanks.