Symptom
When a SCSI or Fibre Channel PCI card is installed, and no boot path has been selected, the server does not start up for up to 7 minutes, or longer. If a display is connected, a flashing question mark appears on screen during this delay.
Solution
Important: This symptom does not indicate a hardware issue.
There are two solutions to this issue.
Change the Startup Volume
1. Wait for the Xserve to startup.
2. Select a valid startup volume in the Startup Disk pane of System Preferences.
3. Use the setstartupdisk command as discussed in the Setting Up Mac OS X Server for Xserve manual.
Remove the SCSI or Fibre channel card
If the issue still persists, remove the SCSI and/or Fibre channel cards and test.
If the issue persists after removing the SCSI or Fibre channel card, there may be another issue. Additional troubleshooting documents that may help you are listed below.
Additional information
When the Startup Disk Preference Pane is used to select a valid startup volume, this information is written to firmware as a boot path. If a boot path on the server is missing and one of the cards mentioned above is installed, the BPS (Boot Path Search) will search through all possible SCSI IDs and LUNs looking for a startup device.