Desktop Troubleshooting by Model
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Dell
Optiplex 960
- Resources
- Issues
- As of 15 Oct 2012
- These systems adamantly refused to boot any of the live images from the network. Working hypothesis is its newer(-ish) components were lacking drivers in the live boot images that caused them to stall out when attempting to register the devices.
- Booting from imaged HDDs and/or live CDs would show an intermittent problem where the bootstrap process would stall right up until you started banging on the keyboard. Literally, the framebuffer (console) wouldn't update or appear to move forward until I began intermittenly hitting Alt, Ctrl, or Shift. It would then move forward a single step at a time per key hit. Bizarre. The live CDs tested were 32-bit versions of either Ubuntu 10.04 or 12.04. Working hypothesis is a 64-bit image would behave better (needs confirmation).
- LTSP boots using anything other than the 486 kernel (misnomer, pretty sure it should be 686, x86, or just 32-bit, as 486 was pre-Pentium). It would happily boot into this environment, but choked on the default 'printme' LTSP boot which, I believe, chooses which kernel to load according to hardware.
- Two of the 13 systems tested refused to POST initially. Instead, the amber light on the motherboard would steadily flash on and off.
- According to official documentation on beep codes and blinking lights (found here), this system was suffering either a motherboard, front panel, or power supply failure. Eventually determined the ribbon cable connecting to the front panel was installed backwards. Restored, and then saw the LEDs on the front panel faintly and sporadically blinking, indicating bad power. However, there was an unlabeled black switch on the PSU which, when pressed, appeared to give the mother board an additional jolt of power (this switch was not consistently on all of the PSUs for this model). Was able to successfully and consistently POST the system hitting this button and it's front panel power switch, even going so far as to load a network image without issue. However, it would not reliably boot from its front panel power switch, so the system was ultimately rejected. The PSU tested positively (but really, those PSU testers don't really do a lot: It's the amperage that'll kill you [and boot your system]).