Sorry, the hold-the-button trick did not work, the screen went blank but nothing happened afterwards. However resetting the PWRD_EN jumper on the system board did the trick.
We have a brand new R320 server with iDRAC7 that is well and truly locked up due to extraordinary circumstances. The server deployment and OS installation were interrupted due to a system crash elsewhere that also destroyed necessary configuration information. As a result, we are left with a server in which: We want to reset iDRAC to factory defaults to start over, but cannot find a way to accomplish this. We cannot boot to BIOS setup (F2) to reset to defaults as the local console is disabled by iDRAC. Talk about a chicken and an egg: console which is disabled would be enabled by the hard reset, but to complete the reset you would need the console. Argh. We cannot log on to iDRAC remote console as we do not have the root password, which also keeps us from running DRAC tools remotely. We could run racadm locally without credentials, but that would require a local OS installation in the server, which we do not have. What we need is a hard, hard reset of iDRAC without local console or iDRAC root. All we have is unlimited physical access to the server, that's all. How can we do that? Is there a physical switch, jumper, whatever somewhere to euthanize iDRAC for good? A diagnostic boot gizmo of some description? I am thinking of e.g. the vFlash slot. Is there a special boot image that we could copy to a SD card to hard reset the server on power cycle?
iDRAC7 hard reset without local console or OS