Hello. New to the forums. I recently bought 70 Apple Xserve Servers without Hard Drives from a GOV Auction. EMC 1971's, EMC 2107's and EMC 2144's. None of these units have Hard Drives or HD Caddies. I bought a couple of HD's off of Ebay to run some Diagnostics on these units just to see what the Hardware setup is but I'm having problems getting a Diag program to start. I'm not a Mac person, I'm a Windows person so I don't know much about Mac Operating System. My brother, who is more into the Mac stuff gave me a Snow Leopard OS X disc. What I'd like to do is run some sort of Diag program for these servers so I can see what Hardware is in them without having to take each one apart. Things like Make/Model/Processor/NIC Card/Motherboard/Peripherals/etc... How do I boot into these systems with the OS Disk my brother gave me to access this information? What KEYS do I need to press? Thanks in advance.Your trying 10.6 on these then. I'd actually see if you can get these to boot off of a Linux Distro like Ubuntu or Mint and see if it will run it. The Intel CPU's and hardware specs to me I would think that it should run Linux ok. With linux there are tools readily available to see what the hardware specs are. You might even be able to get it to boot off DVD install disc of Linux RUNNING in the LIVE environment and be able to look at specs.

70 of these servers from an auction... curious how much you picked all these up for and what your plans are for that many of them? 

My knowledge of Apple is very limited. I dont care for Apple and have been mainly Microsoft and Linux OS for years. Curious if there is ability to get into BIOS on these Xserve servers to see your specs that way. Do you have the option to press Delete key or another hot key to get into the BIOS. From in the BIOS you would be able to see CPU and RAM specs and maybe even GPU for integrated GPU shared memory amount etc.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/XserveIf you press and hold "C" immediately after turning it on then it should boot from the CD.  The CD you have should work on both the EMC2107 and the EMC2144 as they use Intel CPUs.  The EMC1971s are much older and use PowerPC CPUs so would only be able to run 10.5 (Leopard) as the NEWEST OS (of course there are Linux distros that will also run on PowerPC).  That said, the PowerPC ones are probably too old to really be useful for anything other than as a collectors item or to play about with.  The Intel ones would be able to be used for SOMETHING although they aren't going to be great in terms of performance per watt.