s5000pal makes a ticking noise and doesnt boot up

[tomgom999]

i recently bought a second hand s5000pla server board
i managed to get it to boot into the bios screen once ,but now no mattter what i try the system starts to boot but doesnt go any further and there is an clicking sound coming from the board,
my gut feeling is that the board is short circuiting but i have no way to prove this ,
the setup is two e5320 cpus
850 watt psu
2x2gb fb ram
i have tried it without the ram plugged in as well
any help would be apreciated

[T.J.]

Any clicking sound refers to a problem in a hard drive and not the board, so try to use some different hard drives and check if you are still getting similar clicking sound issue. Or you can also test your power supply, if it has some problem, manually using a multimeter or you can purchase a power supply tester to perform an automatic PSU test.

[tomgom999]

i wish it was the hard discs but to keep things simple i dont have a hard disc in the pc till i can sort out the clicking problem, definetly the clicking sound is coming from near the dimm banks

[ApPy10]

Well, if there are no hard drives then how will the system boot after the BIOS, or am I wrong or something? Dont you think that you need a hard drive with an Operating System loaded, so that you can boot till the OS. And after that simply diagnose where the problem lies, that is, if its a memory problem then try to test each memory module, and so on.

[tomgom999]

hi i appreciate that i would need a hardrive to boot to an os,but as far as i know the bios should run with or without a hardrive .

[techman]

I would like to suggest you to switch to the second BIOS Image by switching recovery jumper J3H1 from PIN 1-2 to PIN 2-3 and trying to boot. It's worth a try. That could allow you to boot and reflash BIOS Image 1. There could also be a possibility of bad stick of RAM. Try to pull all the RAM except one stick, and pull the 2nd CPU and check if it boots or not.