Proliant 2500 issues

[Brent Doddington]

I am attempting to build a Proliant 2500 as part of a computer network to be used for training. I have encountered a number of difficulties. Firstly, during boot up, the SCSI controller cannot detect any of the hard drives. I used the SmartStart CD Release 4.70 and did a system erase. When the server booted, it detected the drives, then rebooted, detected the drives again, rebooted again, then did not detect the drives. Despite that difficulty, I attempted to install Windows NT 4.0 Server. Setup detected the drives, but when it was time to create the partitions, I noticed two things: the SmartStart cd did not create a System Utility Partition, and setup could only detect 1GB of space on the drive with the lowest SCSI ID. It is not a hard drive issue, because when I changed the SCSI ID (by plugging them into different slots in the backplane) different drives exhibited the same problem, and NT 4.0 setup could address all the space on the drive that previously had the lowest SCSI ID. I can complete the first portion of the installation, but after the machine reboots, I get a non valid system disk error- probably due to the previously mentioned SCSI issue. Does anyone know how to fix any of these problems? Secondly, are the SmartStart cd's system specific?

[Gert Luyten]

1) it might be a faulty SCSI cable or diskcage backplane.

2) no, the Smartstart CDs work on all Proliants but for this model you'll need a version lower than 6.x (f.i. 5.50)

[Brent Doddington]

Thanks for the advice.