Boot issues with Tyan S2518 Thunder LE-T

[ToeJam13]

All,

I have a Tyan S2518 that I salvaged from an embedded network appliance. The board is in fine working condition in that it POSTS, detecting both CPUs and RAM.

I can PXE boot fine into Linux and BSD, but I cannot boot into any OS off of floppy, hard drive or CDROM. The system simply locks up.

I have tried booting off of the built-in Serverworks EIDE controller, as well as the onboard Promise EIDE RAID controller and a PCI Promise EIDE controller. No dice.

I have tried enabling and disabling the MPS 1.5 option and ACPI option in BIOS to tickle any possible HAL issues with no luck.

Ideas?

 

[ToeJam13]

Found the problem. It was a power supply issue.

This board requires at least a 250W supply. With dual processors installed, the system placed a rather high demand on the +5VDC rail.

Modern ATX power supplies tend to place more importance on the +12VDC rails than their older counterparts. As such, my 250W supply simply did not have enough juice to meet a sudden peak in power demand as the bootstrap code began to execute.

I must have been right on the border, because some OSes would boot while others would not.

After dropping in a new 280W supply with a beefier +5VDC rail, the system has had zero issues.

 

[HotWire]

Were you getting the blue screen with some error #'s?