Proliant 3000 Hanging on boot

[Dave Weis]

I've got a Proliant 3000 with 2x 450 mhz PII processors and 1 256meg dimm. I have pulled all of the cards out, but when I try to boot from smartstart, I get the splash screen of the guys in the van, and it stops. I made a system erase disk, but when I boot from that, it gets to Starting MS-DOS and then stops. I have flipped switch 6 back and forth to clear the configuration but it did nothing.

Any ideas?

[Chanler Childs]

Can you boot off the hard drive(s) in it yet?
Are they attached to the onboard scsi controller?

[John Marinov]

Simplify the system even further. Sounds like you have a very low level problem -memory or processor.

Change the memory for known good memory. Change the slot.

Pull one of the CPUs. Then swap them.

Maybe try a video card.

[Dave Weis]

The memory is known good from another functional machine. I have played processor roulette and put them in all of the combinations. I will try to find a pci video card and see if that makes any difference.

Thanks

[Dave Weis]

This is getting strange. I have replaced the power supply, the mother board, the cd rom, the ram, the processors, and the vrm's, with no change. I pulled the smartarray card and it still hangs on booting smartstart. I did make a system erase disk and it booted fine, and I can put in a linux install CD and it boots fine, we put in the firmware update floppies and they boot fine.

I left smartstart loading all night and in the morning it said error 76 loading smart start. Does that mean anything?

[Frank Kaufman · Accepted solution]

I had a similar issue with an ML530. It turned out to be a CD ROM drive issue.

Try a different drive, and I mean a different part number. In the case of the ML530 it would work fine with a 32X drive but would hang using the 40X that came with it from the factory. Changing the drive to another 40X did not work.

[Dave Weis]

The machine had no cdrom when I purchased it, so I've tried a pair of generic drives. I will try to round up a compaq drive and use it.
Thanks

[Frank Kaufman]

I have some original ProLiant 3000 CD ROM drives if you are stuck.

Please assign points to the answers you get.

[Dave Weis]

It did end up being the CD rom. I had tried two working Sony drives that wouldn't load smart start, but I tried a Compaq slot load from a different 3000 and it worked fine.

I will try to figure out points. Thanks for the help!