HP Proliant ML 350 g5 with Win 2008 crazy behavior

[LiceoFoscarini]

The ML 350 g5 of our school beginning last Friday has serious problems.

On Friday it suddenly reset and went into a loop: the message was "Logical drives have been disabled ... press F2 if you accept the risk of data loss".

I pressed F2 and went into a recovery shell; at last the system reboot Win 2008 and seemed to work but very slowly; then a blue screen appeared and all the mess began just as before.

I tried several times to reboot the server with bizarre behaviors; once using a shell I found C: unity empty, but D: (never created) containing the system; another time both C: and d: appeared empty.

At last (Friday) I managed to reboot Win2008; everything seemed to work well, client PC could connect to the domain controller, navigate through a proxy server (squid3) etc.etc.

Then again  suddenly a blue screen appeared and the server reboot.

I then turned off the server until today.

And today I quite easily managed to launch WIn 2008; I executed a chkdsk /F to correct errors if any; chkdsk worked for almost an hour reporting and fixing some minor error and 0 bad sectors.

The server worked fine for nearly an hour, then again blue screen and reboot.

Today every other try was unsuccessful and at last we turned off the server again.

We unmounted the twin 2 1/2 HD and remounted; we unmounted the power supply: it was very very hot; we remounted it in the alternate slot, but nothing changed.

Also the HD controller behind the HD Array was very hot. Changing the slot of the twin HD had no effect.

So 2 possible "killers": the power supply, the HD Smart Array Controller both apparently overheated.

The power supply was already changed about 2 years ago for overheating problems.

But before asking HP for substitution I would like to be sure it's the real killer.

Any other idea of what is happening?

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I add some info to the latter:

I noticed the 3,6 Ni Mh battery pack on the 128 M cache card (see picture) had a green light which turned yellow; now after unmounting and remounting the battery the light is green and the Proliant is working normally.

But 2 hours after the server reboot again looping on the HP Smart Array check (a rotating star infinitely)

Rebooting again and again the server worked again, but I preferred to turn it off. 

Is it possible that all this problem is due to a low of bad battery of the 128 M cache? Shouldn't be an alert somewhere?

The light is now ever green.

Thank you for any advice

Paolo Bonavoglia

Liceo Foscarini - Venezia

[LiceoFoscarini]

No reply ... no solution, situation is more and more desperate.

Just one las question: is it worth to make a last trial and buy a new 128M cache battery (not too expensive)?

Or is it better to send the server to some HP customer center, which risks to be time and money consuming?

Or is it better to think to a new server (this one is from 2008)?