I have ran into this same issue due to a bad KVM cable.

I know how this sounds as at first I did not see how this could relate to a boot issue especially as soon as the Dell splash screen.

However replacing the KVM cable fixed our issue.

I assume if your not running KVM hardware replacing cables to the direct Keyboard, video, or mouse would do the same thing..

Worth a shot..

Lastly,

I would also try retrieving a boot disk from Dell to update the ESM (Embedded Server Management), or (and) the BIOS to the latest rev.

Good luck

Mark Spencer

I know this might come a few years late, but I think I found out the reason for this behaviour.

I recently got a 2850 server, it booted fine at the workplace, brought it to home to use it as a personal web server. Installed some RAM and disks, attached a Dell LCD to it and booted. A01 BIOS, and hey presto, it freezes at the BIOS splash screen, just one quarter of the progress bar completed.

And I tried everything ranging from disabling the on-board RAID to pulling disks, changing memory and so forth, to no avail. It justs sits there, and does not even reset the keyboard controller (no lights flashed on my keyboard), so it's power cycle -time at every attempt.

Finally it dawned on me. I yanked the VGA cable out and started the machine without a monitor, and watched closely the keyboard lights. What do you know, keyboard reset and I pushed the cable back in. And yes, it was booting like nothing was ever wrong.

It seems that the motherboard display card wants to use the VGA-provided communication to displays, and if the displays are certain type - say, Dell (!), everything goes haywire. At my workplace the monitor I tested the server with was a LG LCD, and at home I had a Dell LCD. The first time I booted the machine, the display showed some new logo about pixel perfect something on VGA, this probably was the result of the communication the server tried. And after that, all this fancy stuff caused the server to freeze at POST.

So, long story short, if having these problems, yank the VGA cable out for twenty-or-so seconds at boot-up, wait for keyboard reset, plug the vga cable back in and you're fine.

And anothe few years later...lol, but yes we had this very same problem with a 2850 using a KVM. Again the boot hung up at post about a 1/4 of the way through and honestly if I hadn't run accross this thread we might not have ever figured it out. Thanks to both the OP's from 2006 and 2009 for this really saved my ***.