Booting up board without full laptop

Framework Laptop 16
, ,
1

I’m trying to boot up the Framework 16 motherboard without being attached to the rest of the laptop. This started as a recovery attempt after the screen got smashed and part of the chassis got mangled. I’ve since designed a 3D printed “chassis” to hold the mainboard.

Although I managed to get it to boot after a while, there’s 2 issues remaining :

  • I need to physically press the power button to boot it up after giving it power, which is odd because I set the option in the BIOS to boot when it receives power
  • This only works if the LED is green/white’ish. However sometimes the LED lights up alternating blue/red, in which case I need to either wait a long time, press the button a bunch of times, or basically it feels like I need to ‘get lucky’

Is there any information on what the proper procedure is for booting up the mainboard without being plugged into the laptop chassis ? Or why the BIOS option to start automatically when it receives power doesn’t work ?

2

Do you have it connected to the main battery or did you add the optional RTC battery? If not, the board likely is losing the settings when power is removed - but not when it is just powered off.

3 Likes
3

That’s a good point, I’ll look into the RTC option.

4

Hopefully the 16 does power-on-after-power-fail better than the 7040u/7080u… They have that setting in BIOS, but it’s totally ignored. Haven’t found a way to make them power on automatically.

The 16 has chassis intrusion switches, doesn’t it? Someone mentioning them: How does one reset the BIOS password (when forgotten) on the FW16? - #2 by CauseOfBSOD

On the 13 you can tell the BIOS to ignore chassis intrusion, so they’re happy in a CoolerMaster case. Not sure about the 16.

5

I think you need the expansion bay connected, before it will boot.

6

Actually it will boot, but it takes a long time and requires a bunch of pressing the small button on the board. Very inconsistent, I can’t make heads or tails of it.

7

That is because it is looking for the EEPROM on the expansion bay that tells it what is in the expansion bay. It must be doing lots of timeouts waiting for the EEPROM to report, and if there is the possibility of an individual report for each item (known ones are fans, dGPU, dual slot m.2 board, and if dGPU and m.2 board don’t report then there is probably an individual request for each PCiE channel). From that list I get 7 possible targets - and there may be more we don’t know about, each with timeouts and retries, so that will take a significant time.

8

So after adding the BIOS battery, when I plug it in, the LED lights up white/green-ish (in reality the blue and red also are on, but the others are brighter). But even though I set up the BIOS to ‘power on as soon as AC is plugged in’ it doesn’t power up when I plug in, even after waiting a while. However, when I press the button it powers up almost immediately, so it seems that that BIOS option is either not working or it’s not working in case there are certain things not connected.

9

Same issue with the 7040 series 13" AMD mainboards … “Power on AC attach” is in the BIOS, but Framework support confirmed that it doesn’t work and, from their response, it sounds like it will never work.

I hope things go better for you with the 16" … I was very disappointed that I couldn’t use the AMD mainboard as a server.