Proliant 1500 does not boot

[Ayman Altounji]

the system:
Proliant 1500
(5) 4.3 gig drives in swap bays
128 megs ram
(1) 166 Mhz processor
(1) cd drive internal
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the problem:
A buddy of mine picked up a Proliant 1500 for me, but couldn't
wait to play around on it. The machine worked according to him
and he wanted to try putting Linux Mandrake on it, during the
install, he decided to reset the machine (power it off, then on
since there is no reset button on this thing). After that, it
never started up again (fully).

turning on the system lights up the power LED, fans spin
(all of them), starts to light up the drives LED indicators
(Online then Drive Accees, and then Failure on all 5 drives at
the same time, then goes dark), inits the keyboard (num lock,
scroll lock, and caps lock lights up then goes dark)
NO video
NO error beeps
hard drives do NOT spin up
cd lights up for a few seconds, but does nothing else.
floppy drive does not light up at all
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what I tried so far:
boot off of floppy, i set the correct jumper, but the floppy does
NOT access at all.

verified the floppy drive is good (swapped it with a known good one)
tried again: boot off of floppy, i set the correct jumper, but the
floppy does NOT access at all.

boot off of a smartstart cd, cd spins a bit, but that's all.

swapped the cd drive out with a know working one.
tried again: boot off of a smartstart cd, cd spins a bit, but that's all.

tried to set the switch config on the main board to flash bios,
but no beeps, and floppy drive didn't access (so it totally failed)

swapped out the 166mhz processor with a working one, and nothing
happened.

swapped the ram out. since there was 128 megs (2)-32 meg and (4)-16
meg modules, I tried using only 2 of the matched at a time in the
correct banks, and nothing happened.

verified all switch setting are correct.

verified the cmos battery is good (I own a Digital Volt Meter)

verified the power supply is working (I own a Digital Volt Meter)

verified the floppy drive is good (swapped it with a known good one)

tried to use the 'other video' option by using a PCI vid card in
all the PCI slots and then tried a ISA vid card in all the slots.
(I did set the correct switch config for this)

tried using only 4 of the 5 drives, in all possible configurations.
(to rule out a bad drive)

tried using different keyboards

tried using different monitors

therm sensor on case checked out to

Power LED on SCSI backplane of RAID array lights up

Power LED on System i/o board lights

ERR LED on Processor/RAM card for the installed proc does NOT light
---------------------------

So far it sounds like my buddy did something else to this machine
and is afraid to tell me what it was. I really don't care what it
was, I just want to get the thing working.

Does anyone have any suggestions ?

-Lamer

[Ayman Altounji]

You could try clearing the NVRAM by going on the system board and flipping switch 6 of the maintenance switch (SW1) located close to the lithium battery. One flip to on you power the system up until you get 177 error, then shut it down to bring that switch to default off then run the SCU (system configuration utility). Hope this will help.