Well, I finally received the last piece of hardware this week. After over a month of trying to obtain a SCSI hard drive tray on Ebay, I was finally able to obtain one for around $12.00. The last one that I thought was on it's way was canceled. The reason the person gave me was due to 'an inventory error'.
The $12.00 tray came with an 18GB SCSI hard drive. Small, but still a nice bonus which I didn't expect. I installed the hard drive, got everything hooked up and then booted the machine with a Linux distro to be installed. It booted up fine into the 'live' function of the Linux distro's CD. I then went to install and the installation was able to get about 24% done and then the server reboots itself. This is the same problem I experienced previously. At about 12-15min, the server just reboots. I tried three times to install Linux and the machine just can't make it through the process without rebooting.
Like I've mentioned before, this is usually a characteristic of an overheating CPU. The only symptom that plays against this is the LED fault readout on the motherboard I interpret to be a PCI bus problem. With no PCI cards installed that equates to a bad motherboard. Maybe I can find an inexpensive IBM x330 motherboard on Ebay, which will continue to increase the price of this project.
It is back to the drawing board for now. I will research more and see if I can solve this rebooting problem or if it is feasible to purchase a motherboard replacement. If not, I will pass this hardware on to someone who has more time, resources, know-how and/or $$ to breathe life back into it.
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It seems like this x330 is putting up quite a fight. Indeed, the reboot symptoms are generally CPU overheat protection. If you boot into the BIOS setup, you can find an error log that will tell you the exact problem. The diagnostics functions may also be of assistance.
If it is a PCI error, make sure the risers are firmly in place. Mine wouldn't boot without them. Compressed air would be useful at this point as well. Pull all memory, connectors, etc. After a good cleaning reseat everything. This tends to fix many common errors as things can shift in shipping. If the error log shows a failing device, perhaps it could be disabled as well (like a serial port or onboard scsi).
If it is a CPU heat issue, make absolutely sure you have high quality heat sink compound applied. Pentium IIIs will cook without it.
Also, it could be a Linux kernel problem with the IO-APICs and such. Ensure you are up to date with the kernel, disable unused IRQs like parallel and serial ports, and check again.
Hopefully you will get all this worked out. The x330 is a very capable and solid server.
I will update my blog with comments on the controller and drives I used in the next few days. I also am working on a pretty good review of Linux file systems.
Kevin
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