Poweredge 2600 Wont boot

The RAID controller driver.  You need to load the driver for the PERC 4/Di from support.dell.com.

I agree

Actually, I may have misread the question ... it is not even booting to the CD at all?  Can you boot to ANY CD?  Can you boot to the 2003 CD on another ANY other machine?

You'll need to go to http://support.dell.com, select Servers / PowerEdge / 2600, and then under Windows Server 2003 download the appropriate storage drivers (SATA, SAS, SCSI).  In particular you are looking for a floppy disk image that contains oemsetup.inf.  You'll need to press F6 during the boot and then allow it to add the storage driver from the floppy disk.  See http://support.microsoft.com/kb/314859 for more information.

Server setup isn't too bad once you get past the storage drivers.  Good luck!

Let me help make things easier here ... IF it is the RAID driver.  The PowerEdge 2600 only supports SCSI drives, and the onboard RAID controller is the PERC 4/Di.  The drivers are not so much a floppy "image" as they are a collection of drivers that you copy to a floppy disk.  However, this is probably the biggest difference in installing 2003 vs XP ... until you get to the Desktop :)

http://support.dell.com/support/downloads/download.aspx?c=us&l=en&s=gen&releaseid=R99970&SystemID=PWE_FOS_XEO_2600&servicetag=&os=WNET&osl=en&deviceid=2608&devlib=0&typecnt=0&vercnt=5&catid=-1&impid=-1&formatcnt=0&libid=35&typeid=-1&dateid=-1&formatid=-1&source=-1&fileid=129538

its not booting to any cd and yes the cd works in other machines. Its not even really spinning up to try and boot from it.

It kinda try's to boot form the floppy. I just need to find another floppy drive to try the storage drivers that dbraunschweig mentioned. Unless you have another option.

I was considering resetting the entire bios but I cant find out exactly how to do it. Its not like most computers where the reset is in the bios itself. Any thoughts on that?

Sounds like your CD drive is broken then.  Unfortunately, this system cannot boot to USB flash drives either.  You might be able to boot to a bootable floppy, but that will not help you.  You cannot load RAID drivers from floppy until after you have booted to the 2003 CD.  On the motherboard are NVRAM jumpers you can use to clear the BIOS.  It is a long shot in this case, but you could try it.  Jumper the NVRAM clear position, boot the system up, then back down, replacing jumper to original position.

stonec,

We had this problem when installing our Dell PowerEdge 6650 Servers too.

1. Download the RAID drivers from Dell. Save a copy of them to a special folder (you might need them later). Put them on a floppy disk (or flash drive) then install them by booting to the disk on start-up.

2. After you've installed the drivers, remove the disk, reboot your machine and configure your RAID Array.

3. Reboot with your Windows Server 2003 CD in the drive.

At this point, we had the problem that the F6 button wouldn't respond during the installation. To solve this issue, we had to make a .iso of our Installation Disk with our RAID Drivers packaged internally, burn it to a CD and install Windows from that CD.

If this occurs, follow these steps:

1. Go back to the computer with your RAID driver files (you should have saved them earlier). Download nLite and ImgBurn:

http://www.nliteos.com/index.html

http://www.imgburn.com/

2. Insert CD1 of your Server 2003, then use ImgBurn to make a .iso out of it.

3. Open nLite and load the .iso you made into it. Follow the prompts to include your downloaded RAID drivers into the .iso.

4. Burn your .iso to a CD with ImgBurn.

5. Boot up your server, insert the CD.

The Server 2003 installation will inherently recognize your RAID drivers and will install without a hitch.

Hope you don't run into this issue, but this should help you if you do - it took us 3 days to sort out when we did.

Cheers!
Mike

Also, I tried to boot from a usb cd drive but it did not even try to boot from it. The usb support is enable in the bios. I didn't see the usb cd drive in the bios boot sequence either.

I kinda want to do a master reset on the bios and start from scratch since i got this second hand. Anyone know how to do that?

It has nothing to do with the drivers -- either the CD drive is bad or the controller is bad. You have to do what I suggested earlier and install a different CD drive. You can even try an external USB CD drive, since I'm pretty sure that the PowerEdge 2600 had an option to boot off of USB CD drives.

See the jumper information for clearing NVRAM in my previous post.

Actually, this has nothing to do with the BIOS options -- when you are booting, instead of pressing F2 to get into BIOS, press F12 for boot options. There should be an option to boot off a USB CD drive

If you want to reset the BIOS, you can do so by:

1. Moving the jumpers on the motherboard

Or.... you can do it the easy way and

2. Remove the CMOS battery, try to boot. Insert the CMOS battery and try to boot again.

I would recommend clearing the BIOS using the jumpers designed to do so ...
http://support.dell.com/support/edocs/systems/pe2600/en/sm/jumpers.htm#1045573

I am assuming this is the problem but I dont have another cdrom to swap out at the moment