headless crunchers

[WhiteFireDragon]

this is the first time i built a computer dedicated to only crunching. i want to run it without a monitor but it wont boot . then i plugged in the video card with the monitor cable connected, and it boots fine and i connect to it remotely using VCN. so i isolated the problem between the mobo and video card connection. so is this the OS's fault or the mobo's fault? i looked in the bios and there's nothing i can set to disable video card detection. any workarounds i can do? it's an EVGA x58 mobo and win7 64bit.

[D_A]

I've never yet owned a motherboard that would post without a video adaptor of some kind. I'm sure some will, but I'm never had one. I just leave a minimal vid card in there with no monitor attached.

[WhiteFireDragon]

ah guess it's the mobo's fault then. thanks guys /thread

Something that works for me with desktop boards is to grab a DVI-to-VGA dongle and plug it into the DVI port. It makes the board think a CRT is attached without having to waste a VGA cable. I'm not 100% certain it'll fix your problem, but it works for me.

i'm assuming you're talking about mobos with onboard graphics? there's no x58 (which is what i'm using) that has DVI ports on there for me to plug anything in. and for mobos that already have these video ports you're refering to, i don't think you would even need to plug any adapters in because it already has an onboard GPU. the problem with these x58/p55 is that it requires some kind of GPU i think.

[fallwind]

There should be an option in the first BIOS screen like "halt on: all but keyboard" Set it to "no errors" and it should boot without a video card.

[WhiteFireDragon]

There should be an option in the first BIOS screen like "halt on: all but keyboard" Set it to "no errors" and it should boot without a video card.

that was the first thing i set in the bios before taking out the video card, and it still would not boot. with the fajillion crunchers you have, do most of them require a GPU?

[=[PULSAR]=]

I just went out and bought a couple Ati 3450 just to avoid the problem.

[fallwind]

Only one machine in the farm has a GPU so I can monitor the rest via BOINCview and remote desktop. All boot fine without the GPU. I'm running all Gigabyte boards now but had some Asus in the past and they worked fine headless as well. The only thing I ever had to do was change the setting mentioned in my previous post. I've never owned an EVGA board so I can't really offer anything further.

[WhiteFireDragon]

i did some digging around on google and this is a huge hit and miss. most say it's impossible with the ones they've tried, and some says it works fine for their mobos.

[Bobsama]

ah guess it's the mobo's fault then. thanks guys /thread



i'm assuming you're talking about mobos with onboard graphics? there's no x58 (which is what i'm using) that has DVI ports on there for me to plug anything in. and for mobos that already have these video ports you're refering to, i don't think you would even need to plug any adapters in because it already has an onboard GPU. the problem with these x58/p55 is that it requires some kind of GPU i think.

A $20 GeForce or Radeon card usually works fine. Maybe you have some old PCI cards sitting around? Anything really. But yeah; try turn off the Halt on Error option.