Proliant 5000 hardware error

[Wayne Jolly]

I have an old Proliant 5000 with dual P-200 processors, 512Mb memory, a Compaq SMART-2/r array controller, and running Windows 2000 Adv Server. It has been running fine for several months, but today, it got a blue screen that only has three lines

*** Hardware Malfunction
Call your hardware vendor for support
*** The system has halted ***

I ran the bios diagnostics and they all ran several times without error. Ran all other diags that I could find too, but when I boot the error returns. This occurs after the second Win2K start up screen (the one with the graphics).

Any help would be appreciated.

Thanks,

[Martin Breidenbach · Accepted solution]

I've seen this error before and I believe the problem was bad memory. Its a Windows error message and Microsoft Knowledgebase has an article about that error:

Hardware Malfunction Results in System Error Message

http://support.microsoft.com/default.aspx?scid=kb;en-us;222973

Did you check the system management event log ? Where the the Proliant logs hardware related events ?

[Wayne Jolly]

Thanks for your response which was right on the money. Just before reading your response I had spent an hour or two trying different things like removing anything that wasn't necessary, swapping parts, etc. Since the memory had passed several passes of the diagnostics, that is what I played with last, but sure enough there was a bad dimm. And of course, it had to be my only 64MB dimms so now my server is down to only 256MB. RATS!