HP SmartStart 8.50 x64 boots into Command Line?

[MDella]

In my case, I have a similar problem however its a little different in that I *WANT* it in CLI mode from the get go...

I'm booting off the CD via the virtual CDROM in the iLO and using the VSP serial port to work on the server (its in London, I'm in the US) and the machine boots into some sort of GUI and I no longer have access to it.  What I want is the standard serial console interface offered via VSP on the iLO.

This machine has a failed P410i controller that i'm trying to work on, but I can't get to it in any way because of course iLO doesn't have an F8 key during the boot process, and now the smart CD (my fall back) doesn't have a non-GUI mode...

Any suggestions?

Marcos

[Jimmy Vance]

The function keys work in VSP mode. F8 is ESC+8 , F9 for RBSU is ESC+9

Another option is to download the HP Scripting Toolkit for Linux. Boot the image via PXE or ove iLO and you are dropped at a shell prompt and have access to many of the HP tools

[humphry]

When booting my hp ML370 from hp smartstart...I end up to what appear as linux command prombt. I dont understand what nature of line should I key in to get smartstart installed. Or how should I go through this installation????

[Torsten.]

Version 8.50 is really old - what is the generation of the server and what are you trying to install?

[kenjohns]

Peter Capriccio

Re: HP SmartStart 8.50 x64 boots into Command Line?

The modification to the xorg.conf file and manual startup of "X" was just to highlight, in my experience anyway, a possible root cause. I would imagine that only HP would be able to offer you an "official" supported solution, however the following worked for me (NOTE the usual disclaimers apply, your mileage may vary, you didn't hear it from me, etc). Basically, all I did was to edit the xorg.conf file as before (using "sed" in my case, but you could use "vi" or whatever else is compiled into BusyBox) and then startup "X", the window manager, etc, by running the following init scripts:

S52X
S54icewm
S56mouse
S58firefox
S60boot.health

The above scripts (well, they are actually symbolic links to the "real" scripts elsewhere) all reside in "/etc/init.d/boot.d". I ran them like so:

# sed -i.original '/Depth/s/24/16/g' /etc/X11/xorg.default-us
# for n in 52 54 56 58 60 ; do /etc/init.d/boot.d/S${n}* start ; done

^^^^^^^^^^^^  Great job, these two command lines worked well. 

Note: there are other S* scripts in that path one might also check.