XServer dead...won't boot, no signal to monitor although fans start up... ?

[ben604]

Hello!

 

We've got a Mac server that's decided to fail. It has been crashing over the last few days, requiring a hard reset, but we didn't have the time to properly investigate what was going wrong with it.

 

Anyway, we've come in this morning and it won't boot. The fans start, we have a single green light and a amber light which flashes 3 times. There's no signal to the monitor.

 

I've tried:

 

removing power cables, holding the power button while unplugged to drain the caps - no change

removed the watch battery on the main board - no change

re-seated the ram - no change

 

anyone got any ideas?

[Danp]

Have you tried to remove the hard drives and then boot it? Ours played up like this when it lost the raid configuration.

[ben604]

Hey Dan,

 

Yeah, gave that a go, there's only one drive in it. Still nothing Is there a raid card in them? Should I remove the battery on that?

[Danp]

They are all slightly different setup, some have a card and yes there is a battery on that some are setup via main board. Ours just lost the settings bizarrely!

[ben604]

Right, I've had just about everything unplugged and plugged back in, still no joy.

 

We do, by chance, have a spare logic board/fan array and PSU kicking about, you think it's likely to be the mainboard? Don't want to waste an hour replacing it to find out it was something completely different!

[Sean-OC04]

Have you tried safe mode boot, or Verbose mode?

 

If there's no boot the first thing to try is to replace the PSU?

[ben604]

Thanks for the suggestions guys. I decided to replace the mainboard last night and it's back up and running, thankfully!