Restore Hard Drive HP7958A

[CustomColor]

I have an HP 9000 340 Series CPU with an HP 7958 hard drive that recently crashed (was getting a red light indicating hard drive error). I recently hired a technician to fix the hard drive but I am having issues restoring the configuration.

When I boot the computer, it appears to go through the PDC boot up process and then hangs up with the message:

"

SEARCHING FOR A SYSTEM (RETURN To Pause)

RESET To Power-Up

"

I cannot get to a command prompt of any type. Any suggestions on how to interrupt the boot process?

Thanks

AGF

[Dennis Handly]

It would help if you could tell us how old this fossil is. :-)

And what OS version it is running.

[CustomColor]

Ha, yes, it is getting to be a relic, I'll have to reboot to get the details, but it was built in 1989 and I believe runs HP UX 10.0.

[Pete Randall]

Posting the output of the following commands would be enough to cover the basics:

model

uname -a

[Matti_Kurkela]

Since the last line of the original post says this, the requirement for "model" or "uname -a" output is a bit much:

> I cannot get to a command prompt of any type. Any suggestions on how to interrupt the boot process?

The partsurfer.hp.com website tells me that 7958A is a 130 MB hard drive, and it goes with an ESDI controller board with a HP-IB interface. Partsurfer also tells me that HP support for this product ended at the end of December 1998.

The "340 Series" suggests it would be this system:

http://www.hpmuseum.net/display_item.php?hw=205

The "Product Documentation" link on this page seems to have boot ROM configuration guide and service manuals available. Perhaps those would help?

If my model identification was correct, it has a Motorola CPU, so the HP-UX version would be 9.x or older.

[Pete Randall]

Thanks, Matti.  I think I just discovered the disadvantage to being able to jump to the latest post:  you either have to remember or go back and read.

[CustomColor]

Thanks, Matti - That is the machine that we own. Its old, but it still worked great.

I'll check out the documentation. Maybe that will help since I cannot get to any kind of command prompt.

I had the entire system backed up on a tape drive and we were hoping to restore it from there once we can get it to read a drive and get a prompt.

[Patrick Wallek]

How did the technician you hired "fix" the drive?  Was it replaced with a different one? 

Is that drive the only hard drive on the system?  If that drive is where HP-UX was installed, and the drive was completely replaced, then you are out of luck.  You would probably have to reinstall the operating system and then restore your data from the tape.