ProLiant 5500 and 6000 both sending ASR every day or so

[Charles Cosby_2]

I bought a ProLiant 6000 last year and set it up with SmartStart 5.5 and Windows 2000 Server. It would do an ASR (automatic server recovery) reboot about once a day or so. Then after a few reboots it would just boot into the EISA partition and into system setup. I did advanced diagostics and found no hardware problems. I even erased the system and rebuilt several times with the same results using Automatic setup. I eventually wiped the entire system and set it up manually without the Compaq support software. It worked great for a week or so. Then I tried to install the Compaq Software manually for the IMD and RAID controllers. Then the system went back to doing ASR's all the time. I finally wiped it, installed W2K server and left off all Compaq software. It has been running flawlessly ever since.

This year I bought a ProLiant 5500 and did the same thing. Same exact problems, exact same setup procedure and almost identical hardware. Is this a problem with Smart Start 5.5 or SmartStart with these machines all together? I know I tried a ProLiant 3000 with it an it never did work, I had to do it manually. However the ProLiant 3000's I set up , I used older versions of SmartStart(3.3 and 4.9 I believe) I would like to use the Compaq Management software but it just keeps rebooting the system until it shuts it down.

Thanks for your help in advance
Charles

[Sunil Jerath]

Hello Charles,
I am sorry to hear your experience with the configuration of our servers. SmartStart version 5.50 is the latest one which you can use to configure the older servers. But surely you can use the previous version of SmartStart and then update the support pack from our Web Site.
Now let's assume you want to start from scratch and there is no data involved. Just make sure that you just have the bare minimum hardware in the server. Run the system erase and then instead of rebooting just shut down the server. Swap the position of the HDDs around especially the first HDD. Then boot with the Smart Start 5.50 or a previous version(Not 3.x though). Please make sure that the system bios as well as the firmware of array controller if any is uptodate. Select the assisted method of smart start installation.
Please let me know if I could be of further assistance.

Regards,

[Charles Cosby_2]

Sunil,

Thanks for the quick response. I do have 4.9 available and will try that when I can take that server down (not for 2 more weeks). I will remove all ram that I can and hard drives. I have always updated to latest drivers and bios' rompaq's etc. It was the reason I bought 5.5 (I actually ordered 6.1 but found out it will not run on my system). To clairfy, I am running this Proliant 5500 with two PII Xeon 550's and a SMART 3200 controller. The ProLiant 6000 had four PII Xeon 400's. These systems both worked fine with an earlier version of SmartStart with Windows NT 4.0 but I wanted to upgrade both of them to Windows 2000 and decided a complete system wipe with the latest SmartStart was the way to go. I will let you know how I make out.

[Sunil Jerath]

Hello Charles,
Surely you can start with 5.50 and just follow the procedures I have stated earlier. Please do let me know as to how you make out.

Regards,