Applies to:

Supermicro X9 and X10 series motherboards

Description:

Occasionally you may receive events in the IPMI system event log after a memory failure that do not point to a particular faulted component. The output of the errors can vary depending on how you're accessing the event log, and ipmitool in particular has been known to encounter bugs occasionally when attempting to decode Supermicro's event logs.

Here are some examples of such vague event log entries:

11 | 10/10/2000 | 12:00:00 | Memory | Correctable ECC | Asserted | CPU 0 DIMM 8

12 | 10/10/2000 | 12:00:00 | Memory | Uncorrectable ECC | Asserted

In the examples above, the first indicates a corrected ECC error on CPU 0 DIMM 8, which isn't a slot number on the motherboard. In the second example, the CPU/DIMM locator is missing entirely. Obviously there is a hardware problem, but you need a slot number that looks like P1-DIMMA1, or P2 DIMM1B, as these follow the naming convention used by the motherboard slots.

Luckily, most motherboards in the X9 and X10 series will have an additional event log stored in the BIOS, which tends to give more concise error reporting. However, this log is only accessible from the BIOS, so you will need to reboot your system in order to view it.

Instructions:

1. Reboot your system and hit <Delete> during POST to enter the BIOS configuration.
2. Navigate to Event Log > View Smbios Event Log, and hit <Enter> to open the event log viewer.
3. Look for errors that give slot numbers, and use these to correlate to faulty RAM. If your event log does not show slot numbers, or if the errors do not immediately indicate a RAM fault, then contact Support for further instructions.