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At work we have received a couple dozen of these Apple Xservers. The HDDs have been wiped on all but one so there's no OS installed. The ID/Status LED on the front/rear panel of these servers (all of them!) is doing the intermittent-blink thing that, as far as I can tell, means "There's an error." This is not the continuous flashing that's enabled by the front panel button to ID the server from the other side. I suspect it's a chassis intrusion indication but that's just a theory

The LED begins blinking as soon as power is applied; even before the power button is pressed & while the white Power LED is off. I have tried resetting the NVRAM/PRAM through the keyboard Option/Command/P/R and also through the front panel, using the button next to the status LED to select a function. No help there.

I've seen this question and that's the right LED, but that question is about the Server ID usage of the LED, and my question is about the Error Indicator usage of the same LED.

I can boot 10.7 from an external HDD but I do not have an OSX/Server disk available and booting OSX Server 10.6.8 to the login screen (I don't know the password) does not clear the indication. How do I make this LED stop flashing?

Crash Gordon
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1 Answers1

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It means there is a problem detected by the server.

According to the XServe Users Manual (still available online), on page 28 in the Troubleshooting section, it details what the flashing light means:

The System Identifier Light is Flashing

The Xserve has detected a problem. To find out what’s wrong, open the Server Monitor application on either the Xserve or a remote administrator computer

In my experience, this light will flash if there is no boot media. I installed FreeBSD on a G4 XServe and that alone was enough to make it stop flashing. However, I did have the proper OS X Server install media; you may need that to properly clear the error. If you can get some old boot media, you should be able to get this resolved pretty easily.

Allan
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