xserve no video

[Project Alice]

Hi all, I hope it's ok to post this here as the xserve has similar hardware to the Mac pro and there's no xserve forum.
I just bought a used xserve, 2006 2.0Ghz quad core. I just hooked it up to make sure it worked okay. It has no hard drive, I just wanted to see if it would fire up. Well it turns on and looks like it's running, but there's no picture on the screen at all. I know the monitor works. I am not sure if xserves "chime" or not. But if it is supposed to, it doesn't. All the fans are running at full blast which I presume it should be without an OS installed. I would figure it would boot up with a question mark. Do these things need a hard drive to be installed in in order to function properly?
Hopefully one of you has more experience with one of these things than I do, I was under the impression that it should be just like setting up a Mac pro.

 

[goMac]

The Xserves are just usually very noisy machines, even with the OS loaded. Hard to tell if the fans are running due to an issue, or because there is a problem with the machine. Those fans always tend to run full blast anyway.

You should be getting video out, but if not, try running the Xserve in a headless mode.

See page 14 here:
http://www.apple.com/xserve/pdf/Xserve_User_Guide.pdf
(Choosing a Startup Method from the Front Panel)

Pop an OS X CD that's appropriate in there, and boot from the optical disk.

From there, the Xserve should advertise a VNC session (you'll have to track down the IP address) (also see page 28 that manual) and you'll be able to verify it's at least in working order.

I'd advise trying this with an OS X Server disk, especially if one comes with the box. I don't know if OS X client responds to all these special functions, I never tried.

I do not believe the Xserve chimes. I don't think it even has an internal speaker.

It's not exactly like setting up a Mac Pro. The boxes come with a lot of functionality beyond what the Mac Pro has that require special drivers, support, etc. It also does not run the same firmware.