HP Proliant DL380 G7 Series server

[USUHS]

I have an HP server that will not boot.  I came in on Monday to not being able to ping my server.  I walk into the server room and the server looks likes its rebooting but I do not see any screens besides a split second of the HP Proliant splash page.  I cannot hit any keys to push it into BIOS or a menu.

 I have tried to take out the hard drives, the back plane, took out all the memory one by one to see if memory was bad.  

I took off the riser card, still the same instance.  

Randomly, the HP proliant screen will show for longer than a split second and almos finish the loading bar only to continue to reboot to a split second splash screen.  The only thing I have not removed from the server was the power board, the motherboard and CPU I believe.

Can anyone please lend some assistance to this issue.  The server is out of warranty and I would like to fix this without sending an HP guy out.

Thanks

[drayson]

Did you check the power supply/supplies?

If your server has two of them, try them one by one.

[USUHS]

Thank you for your response drayson, I only have one power supply in the server right now.  I will have to see if we have another server with two that I can ask to use for troubleshooting.  In the event that this does not lead to a resolution, does anyone have any other advice to troubleshoot this issue?

Thank you.

[Torsten.]

Most of the times the ILO has a hint in the IML logs.

Try to access the ILO, if it still works!

[USUHS]

Thank you for your response Torsten.  Can you reach it from a boot disk?  When the server reboots, I cannot get into any menus or options or do any key strokes to invoke any menus.  I haved tried spamming F2 F8, F12, delete, n, g, and any other interrupt key in order to get into any menu.  I have been trying to find a boot disk iso I could use to try and get into it by have been un successful.

Any additional advice, please don't hesitate to post.

Thank you very much.

[Torsten.]

At the rear of the server you will see a LAN port labeled ILO. The ILO works as long as power is connected, even if the server is off.

If not configured, ILO gets a DHCP address and have a default password that you can find on a pullout tab.

Connect LAN with a DHCP server enabled, point your browser to the default name and log on.

Name and password is on the tab, user is Administrator.

[waaronb]

This may sound strange but make sure the power button isn't stuck so it acts like it's always being pressed.  I had that happen once, and it was very rare thing, but it did what you're talking about... the server would start up to the point where it would actually pay attention to the power button, and then since it thought it was being held in, it would shut down.  Then since the button was still being "pressed", it would power back up and repeat the whole process.

It's *probably* not that though, but it was worth mentioning.

You could have some sort of thermal failure or invalid fan configuration.  Sometimes these servers are slow to output video during POST, and by the time it turns on the monitor and shows any error messages, it could already be rebooting.

Personally I think HP should disable any monitor power-off signals during POST... that's been a problem for years, where the video is really slow to show up and I've missed a lot of helpful info because most server room monitors aren't that fast to power-on or to switch between resolutions.

[drayson]

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@waaronb wrote:

It's *probably* not that though, but it was worth mentioning.

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Yeah, something you stumble upon at 3am when you have almost completely disassembled the server out of pure frustration and find yourself surrounded by all the parts.

[Torsten.]

Did you log on to ILO? Sometimes you can find a component overheating or wrong sensor reading or something similar ... previously I found a bad placed heatsink resulting in a overtemp condition within less than 10 seconds.

[USUHS]

Hello all,

Thank you for your responses, it really means a lot to take time out to respond to these inquiries.  I have not been able to check the iLo yet but I will be doing so in the next hour so I will definitely repost today with my results.  

I will check the power button as well but I have pressed the button several times to manually turn it off while it was rebooted to try to get the messages to come up to no success.

I will post back asap!

Thank you everyone.

USUHS