HP XW8600 Motherboard Won't POST

[cmyron15]

Considering the exhorbent amount of PCI ports on this board, you should be safe with a PCI USB controller. I know I am running an Intel NIC and a USB 3.0 controller card on the board to try and get the transfer speeds up for some things. One thing to note though is that the single USB port to the right of the PS/2 ports does not work with the BIOS at startup, but you did mention you tried the others. I also found that my Windows keyboards did not work at startup, but my Mac USB keyboard did. I am hoping a USB PCI card clears it up! 

[Frost32]

I managed to find an old ps/2 keyboard to plug in, and it finally works!... Sort of. I have to unplug all usb devices everytime I restart in order to press F1, but that's fine. What's not fine is that it won't detect CPU1. BIOS doesn't display a temperature for it, and Windows only sees 1 processor. Not finding any settings that would disable the 2nd processor. Not sure what's going on this time. Any ideas?

[cmyron15]

Try re-seating the processor. Sometimes with older boards some dust will get stuck and cause the pins to not read properly. If you happen to have a second one or can get one cheap (like 5 bucks) try another to see if it is the socket or the processor itself. I know I had some issues with a newer generation 771 Xeon but threw in some older gen ones and it booted fine. Then I threw the newer gen ones in again and they booted fine too, so it was just the seat. Make sure the pins aren't broken or anything!

[Frost32]

Tried that. Seems to be a problem with CPU socket 1. No noticable damage though. I found something in the BIOS under system info (or something like that) that says:

Processor 0 stepping: 676

Processor 1 stepping: 676

Not sure if that's significant or not or if it'll change if I try running it with a single processor. Windows update is running (200+ updates), so I'll test that tomorrow.

[Frost32]

Done testing. I found that both cpu's have to be plugged in to boot. Solid green power led, keyboard light, fans, but no video, with only one cpu (also the same with no cpu plugged in.) Nothing else to report.

[erico]

The following motherboard layout images should be helpful. HP Admin Bill French kindly provided them at my request. 

The AUX Power header is indeed where you plug in power from the PSU.  

[Frost32]

Thanks for that. But I'm having another problem right now. Do you know of anything that could possibly disable one of the cpu sockets other than it being dead? I ask because my system only sees one cpu. (BIOS and Windows.)

[erico]

A dead CPU will also give you that result.

Have you tried switching the CPUs to verifyn that both of them are operational?

[Frost32]

Tested a lot of things, the results of which are above. See posts 22-25.