sullivan.john•1d agoProlific Poster

I finally fixed a boot loop that had me stuck for 6 hours

I had a client bring in an old Dell Optiplex last week that just kept restarting over and over. I figured it was a bad RAM stick or a power supply issue so I swapped both out but it still kept looping. After three hours of swapping parts and checking connections I finally looked at the BIOS settings and noticed the boot order was set to PXE first. The network boot was failing and making it restart each time. I changed it to boot from the hard drive and it fired right up. Felt pretty dumb for missing something that simple but I learned to check the BIOS sooner. Has anyone else wasted a whole afternoon on a problem that turned out to be a setting instead of a hardware failure?

2 comments

2 Comments

val_taylor1d ago

PXE boot is for network installs, not regular booting.

faith_smith1d ago

PXE boot actually got its start back in the 90s with Intel's Wired for Management spec, and these days @val_taylor is right that it's mostly for network installs but some datacenter guys still use it to boot diskless servers.