DL 380 doesn't boot past POST

[Scott Campbell_5]

Inherited DL 380 (not sure of the generation, but it's dual 733MHz CPUs).

Installed Windows 2003 on it without any problems.

Yesterday, tried to install some new RAM, but upon boot, server errored saying RAM was unregistered and that it had to be registered.

Took out the RAM and restarted server

Came back this morning and server would not boot past POST.

This is what happens:
-Turn on
-as monitor warms up, see tail end of "Compaq Proliant Screen"
-Counts RAM
-initializes CPUs
-SCSI RAID config (Press F1 or F10)
-Intel NIC configuration if you press certain keys (at home now, can't exactly recall)
-screen goes blank + 2 short beeps
-only thing on screen is underscore in upper left that blinks
-pressing keys does nothing
-nothing happens

I placed bootable win2k3 CD in CD drive, but it won't boot to that.

Tried floppy boot disk, won't boot to that either.

Any assistance is greatly appreciated.

-ScottC

[Oleg Koroz]

733 is G1

during F1 or F10 press F10 and select System configuration after Configure Hardware, when you get to the point save and Exit do so.

(You might get to the point where you have to Clear NVRAM with system Maintenance switch SW2 position #6, SCU will be needed to restore F10 access )

for future
http://h18000.www1.hp.com/products/quickspecs/10495_na/10495_na.HTML

[Scott Campbell_5]

Thank you for your reply

Now that I'm at work, I see that I misspoke earlier...

When I said, "Press F1 or F10," I actually meant "Press ESC or F10" where F10 will run the "Option ROM-based Array Configuration Utility." and ESC skips the configuration and continues.

Pressing F10 takes you into Option ROM Config for Arrays, v. 1.0. There is no option for system config. It only lets you set up the RAID config on the drives.

In my first post, I referred to "Intel NIC Congi," which is officially called "Intel Boot Agent v. 2.2 Setup Program." Within that program, Default Boot is set to Local and Local Boot is set to Enable. I'm not sure anything else in here is relevant.

[Scott Campbell_5]

It works now.

I updated the firmware. I'm not sure if that's what did the trick or I got lucky, but either way, the server boots now.

[Terry Hutchings]

Were you able to boot to a cd or floppy after clearing nvram? The symptoms you describe sound like a problem with the master boot record (blinking cursor at the end of post when it tries to boot from the hard drive): http://support.microsoft.com/kb/q155053/

[Scott Campbell_5]

I never purposefully cleared the NVRAM. Whether or not flashing the firmware did that is unknown to me, which is the only thing I did before it started working again.