Compaq Proliant 3000 Problems

[Nic Brown]

Firstly, I am an IT Manager, so don't hold back on techie jargon.

I have a Proliant 3000, PII-333, E39 Rom Revision, with a 2DH Controller and 7 Drives. The drives are split into 2 logicals, 1x4 (Raid5), 1x3 (raid5). 916Mb ram or similar.

Everything was fine until 3 days ago Fan 4 failed, and shut down the machine. I have now replaced the fan and the unit will boot up, go through post and recognises the 2DH, then prompts for F10 (irrelevant as I don't have the service partition.), then goes to a black screen and hangs with an awful lot of disk activity.

I cannot boot from my s/start CD (5.50) as whenever I try that I get some odd characters in the top left corner (still in DOS), then it freezes. All my drive lights are green, and it seems like it is trying to rebuild or verify the partitions on the drives, but I have no way of knowing how it is progressing, and it has been hung like this for 24 hours now.

Can anybody out there save me an awful lot of hassle and tell me the following.

1. Does the 2DH card have to do it's rebuilds or verifications prior to the OS Booting, if not how do I stop it from doing so.

2. Is there any way of knowing how far through a rebuild it has got without S/Start?

3. Any bright ideas on why my S/Start CD won't startup?

4. Any ideas how I can get the thing started. The OS is on the 3 drive array, I was wondering if I could pull the 4 drive out for now and maybe rebuild that from within Windows? (2K Adv Server incidentally).

I'm tearing out what little hair I have. PLEASE HELP ME!!

[Brian_Murdoch]

Hi Nic,

In answer to your questions: -

1) No -The 2DH like all Smart Array controller will continue and rebuild any disks on the fly (speed set by rebuild value set in ACU (High/Medium/Low).
2) ACU (array confiuration utility) will tell you this in the from of percentage rebuild but that's at the O/S side or it can be run from Smartstart. This won't really matter as you can't get there anyway.

3) Fan 4 is behind the LCD display and keeps the CPU's and memory cool. I suspect it's the memory that's at fault -indicated by the garbage displayed on the screen with Smartstart. It has maybe been cooking for a time when the fan was duff although the remaining fan should have been running at full speed to complensate. Remove the memory daughtercard and reseat the dimms.

4)Leave the disks as they are until you can get the system to POST properly.

If you want to get it to a minimum memory configuration for testing, this needs 4 X dimms of the same size in the top bank of the 16-slot memory daughtercard. (See the top cover diagram for layout of the dimm sockets).

It will run with one CPU but you must have terminators in the unoccupied CPU slots.

I hope this helps.

Brian

[Brian_Murdoch]

Nic,

Sorry I was looking at the Proliant 5500 earlier (same chassis) so ignore the memory configutration details. I still think it could be a memory issue but the dimm layout is different in the PL3000/333Mhz model.

See atttached document regards memory configuration and sorry for any confusion.

Regards,

Brian