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Dell T3500 workstation nightmare..

H

HomeyJay

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Jun 29, 2021
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I have a T3500 Xeon workstation with a 250gb Samsung SSD. I’m running out of space and SSDs are crazy cheap compared to what I paid for the 250gb so I bought a 1TB SSD and installed in a spare SATA bay.​

When I turned the machine on, it powered up and got into windows but the new SSD was not to be found, so I thought it probably needed to be enabled in the BIOS.
No matter what key I pressed, I couldn’t get into the Bios. I triedF2, F3, F12, F8, del, tab and every other function key for hours and still I couldn’t get in.
So, I figured that the only other course of action was to reset the bios and then access it with F2.
I did this but still I couldn’t access the bios but now I couldn’t get the board to find the SSD because I forgot that the T3500 defaults to a RAID array as a standard default and I can’t get to the bloody bios to change it. Grrrrrrr..
Can anyone please help - I’m all out of ideas and I have to get the PC working again ASAP!
 
try jamming on f12 to get the boot menu, you can select bios from there. also, make sure your m/kb are plugged into the top usb ports.
 
F2 should get you into bios. Some keyboards you must select the Function key to enable F1-F12 functionality?
 
I have dedicated function keys (F1 - F12) on the keyboard so actual Function key. F12 doesn’t get you anywhere either but I’ve not tried different USB ports. Will try that. No mouse present, just keyboard. Will also unplug the cd drive, just in case that makes a difference. Also going to try another monitor as there’s never been any Dell logo or anything else on screen before it gets to the login screen.
 
F2 is def the key you need to be pressing. Make sure you’re quick, you only have a split second to hit it on time after a complete power down. You may not see a “press f2 to enter bios” screen. It will likely not be there.
 
I’ve been pressing the F2 key several times a second continually from the instant I’ve turned the machine on add sometimes I’ve started pressing the key before I’ve turned the machine on just in case I’ve not been fast enough!. I’ve even kept the F2 key constantly pressed but the buffer just fills up and the PC just beeps continually..
 
Thx but because the bios has been reset, the MB can’t find the SSD - it seems to be looking for a RAID setup or something else. SATA needs to be set to AHCI mode, can’t do that because, I can’t acces the bios. Its a doozy..
 
Try removing the extra drive and leave only the boot drive and see if it'll boot then. If that works then try the windows method for entering bios.
 
I've worked on several T3500s and never had an issue getting into the BIOS using the F2 key. Almost all Dell machines for the past 20 years use either F2 or del to get into the BIOS. F12 will bring up the boot menu, which also sometimes has an option to get into the BIOS setup.

If the machine is booting too fast, just unplug the boot drive so there's nothing to boot to, it should slow the machine down enough where you can press F2.

Two problems that I can say may be happening are:

1) Your keyboard has a USB hub or some other idiosyncrasy that is preventing it from being recognized during the POST process, preventing the machine from registering your key presses. This is a common issue on newer keyboards, especially RGB keyboards. Since the T3500 has PS/2 ports, I would recommend buying a cheap PS/2 keyboard and trying to use that to get into the BIOS. I don't remember if the T3500 has a BIOS option that disables the keyboard/mouse during boot, but if that's the case, a normal USB keyboard won't help either.

2) The VGA BIOS on your video card doesn't work with older DOS display modes. This sounds like the case because the T3500 does show the Dell logo on boot, but won't with some newer video cards. Another possibility is your monitor doesn't support said display modes. Many newer monitors don't support 640x480 and the often strange refresh rates used in BIOS setup. I have a couple of monitors which are like this, and keep an old 15" square Dell VGA monitor around for such issues.

I have a feeling you may have both problems above, but we'll only know if you try a different keyboard, preferably PS/2.
 
Ok, thanks GiGaBiTe, now fixed.
It turned out that using a DVI connector from the PC to the monitor for some reason meant that anything that was in the DOS display modes of the pre-Windows phase of boot, wasn’t being displayed at all. I was already in the BIOS but just couldn’t see it!
When I connected using the display port output from the video card, the whole thing showed up and I could see everything. I had to go and buy a display port cable to see this!
Once I was in the BIOS, I just enabled the SATA channel, launched windows and just added the drive after formatting it. Everything showed up after that!
 
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