Dell 7810 No Video issue
So, I’ve been buying Dell 7810s for my kitten trader 3.0 cluster, and I thought I’d somehow gotten three bad ones from two vendors. No, actually, Dell thoughtfully stores the slot that the video card is in in the BIOS! Changing the video card for another model results in no video – so, if you have a 7810 that you’ve put a new video card in that won’t display anything, the trick is to remove the battery, short the two pins that would have been the battery together, then power it on – the display will, after about 45 seconds (be patient) and one uncommanded power cycle actually light up with the dell logo and a option to push F2 to enter setup – *immediately* go into setup and select the slot # the card is in under ‘video’. (There will be a helpful hint listing video card type on every slot with a detected video card). It will tell you that on systems with a single video card you can select ‘auto’ but as far as I can tell, this is a lie, or maybe is only true if you use only Dell-approved video cards. If you don’t save this setting the next time you boot you will again have no video.
Most of these systems are destinated to be headless for me anyway so I really only need video long enough to configure them, but it’s still a great help. I hope this helps someone else in the same kettle of fish I was in as it took me 2 hours to figure this out.