Well, my backup NAS stopped responding giving me a scare. Rebooting the system showed no internet access and no DHCP address obtained.
Soooo, removed and replaced the 10G PCIE fiber NIC and it did the same dang thing! Woopsy!
Something really wrong and it got worse on another reboot where it would not load anything, do anything, show anything at all!
Hmm, ECC memory? SSD die? What the heck!
Removed 10G card, unplugged SSD, still nothing! No display! Yikes! Bad motherboard?
Unplugged system, removed CMOS battery (voltage check showed good), shorted battery socket terminals, jumped CMOS reset pins. Put it back together, and BIOS starts working again!
Got back into BIOS, set all parms to factory defaults, shut down, plugged in SSD and NIC, and voila! System booted up fine, got DHCP assignment and all good again!
I don’t know how or why, but somehow the bad PCIe 10G Fiber NIC screwed something up bad. This was on a Supermicro X9SCM-F motherboard which is usually bullet proof.
Just a heads up for anybody with similar hardware.
