This is a story on how I managed to boot a headless rig when the mobo had entered into the BIOS.
My one month new MSI RX 5700 Mech GP Edition decided to quit on me this morning
. I could not get it undead.
I suspect maybe memory got damaged by heat - I found it was impossible to mine with it and keep the hot spot temperature under 100 degrees while mining ETH. I watched a Youtube vid on that same card where they found the thermal pads did not cover the mem chips.
I took the GPU out of the rig, then faced a new problem: How to boot the now headless rig back into Windows without a GPU since the Ryzen 3700X CPU in it doesnt have a built in GPU to drive the display. The mobo I have is an ASUS TUF 450M.
I know the mobo usually enters into the BIOS after a hardware change. I was not able to RDP into it from my laptop.
After a lot of trials with reboots and new keyboard sequences I found the correct key sequence to get it to exit BIOS and boot into Windows. Immediately after power-on, I hit the Delete key and held it down for a few seconds until I was confident it was now in the BIOS. I then pressed F10 and Y to confirm. And then it booted into Windows.
The rig is now cpu-mining Monero while waiting for a GPU replacement. I will have to RMA that defective GPU.
My one month new MSI RX 5700 Mech GP Edition decided to quit on me this morning
. I could not get it undead.I suspect maybe memory got damaged by heat - I found it was impossible to mine with it and keep the hot spot temperature under 100 degrees while mining ETH. I watched a Youtube vid on that same card where they found the thermal pads did not cover the mem chips.
I took the GPU out of the rig, then faced a new problem: How to boot the now headless rig back into Windows without a GPU since the Ryzen 3700X CPU in it doesnt have a built in GPU to drive the display. The mobo I have is an ASUS TUF 450M.
I know the mobo usually enters into the BIOS after a hardware change. I was not able to RDP into it from my laptop.
After a lot of trials with reboots and new keyboard sequences I found the correct key sequence to get it to exit BIOS and boot into Windows. Immediately after power-on, I hit the Delete key and held it down for a few seconds until I was confident it was now in the BIOS. I then pressed F10 and Y to confirm. And then it booted into Windows.
The rig is now cpu-mining Monero while waiting for a GPU replacement. I will have to RMA that defective GPU.
My biggest pet peeve was when some rig would stop working and no amount of endless hard-reboots would get it going again. Basically only method was to attach a monitor to 1 GPU and add a keyboard and mouse. This is more challenging than most people think. Reason why is because sometimes the bios picks a random GPU as the main GPU. So you plug it into the main x16 pci 3.0 slot, and nothing displays. So you need to try the other 5. And sometimes its some weird PCI5 x1 2.0 slot which is the display monitor.
Then you gotta attach a keyboard and mouse... but most of the time in bios the USB 3.0 is disabled so you need to find a USB 2 legacy port and enable it in the bios. Then even if you get windows to boot, you need to install the USB drivers to get the keyboard+mouse working. Hence it helps to keep a legacy serial port keyboard laying around. So I know what headaches this can cause.
