I have about 20y of experience building systems (mostly for myself), but I have never seen a thing like this:
Since about 3y, I have a Xeon 1230V2 on a Supermicro X9SCA-F rev 1.01 and 32GiB ECC RAM as my workstation/gamestation. Utilization was relatively low in general, sometimes, there were some heavier encoding or gaming periods. It was always rock-stable. Not the smallest hickup ever.
Last week, I did a update && upgrade on my Debian Jessie installation. Nothing very special there, but a new kernel package was part of that update. The next reboot I noticed that moving windows in X is quite sluggish, thought I must have forgot compiling fglrx for my AMD GPU again. Strangely, the kernel module was already loaded. I decided to compile it again anyways, and rebooted into the rescue mode to do that on a clean ground. I did not get a rescue console, init seemed successful, but there was no terminal session opened for me. In general, since the upgrade to Jessie, some smaller parts do not work as intended (maybe because I changed back to sysvinit).
Anyways, I rebooted and changed init to /bin/sh to try that. Suddenly, a kernel panic, and after a few seconds, a reboot. I can't really remember what the panic was saying, it was too quick. Monitor stays black. I push the reset button, still blank. Turn it off, wait, try again - black. Long story short: since the kernel panic, the system is not POSTing at all anymore. Fans start up, IPMI is accessible (I can see the system cycling through some POST codes - I am not entirely sure what the mean as I can not find a reliable reference), but no beep at all and no display. I have removed everything, cycled RAM, changed PSU, removed the board from the case, clearing CMOS, clearing it over night, CTRL-HOME, DEL/INSERT, ... nothing helps.
What is especially strange, besides the fact that init=/bin/sh leads to a kernel panic which leads to a system not POSTing: If I remove all memory, the board is still not beeping. So I can only suspect that there is severe hardware damage, but I still don't get the causal connection.
I have ordered a new board, not from Supermicro anymore, as they deny RMA (as does Amazon after more than 2y) and have a warranty of just 1y.
Any ideas whether the board or the CPU might be toast? As the memory controller is on the CPU, I am not entirely sure who's to blame for not beeping if no RAM is plugged in. I hope it's not the CPU as the very same model is today 30% more expensive than end of 2012!
Any ideas about what I could try?
