Proliant 800 won't go into setup or read hard drive

[John_846]

Alright, so I'm tearing apart my Proliant 800 and making it a home computer. I changed out the SCSI hard drive because I believe it was bad and put in an Western Digital 20GB. Well, when I start the comp, I can't enter setup(which I believe is F10 correct?) and it won't read my hard drive. It will read my floppy and my CD-ROM. Yes, I've set jumpers and all that. Please help me. I've never had so much trouble with a computer before and I just wanna shoot it.

[JohnWRuffo]

John:

Don't pull anymore hair out...

The F10 Diagnostics are on the drive in a small hidden partition. You build the system partition and install the system configuration utilities with your Smart Start CD.

Next, you cannot install an IDE hard drive in the ProLiant Server. The IDE controller does not have the bios support for IDE disks. It only has a small set of boot bios for CD-ROM's.

To make this server work, you need to install a "SCSI hard disk".

Do you have your Smart Start CD?

If not, you can configure the server with the System Configuration Utility diskettes, here:
http://h18000.www1.hp.com/support/files/server/us/download/13227.html

Let me know if you need more help.

[John_846]

Alright, I did find out last night that it did not use IDE hard drives. Well, under the assumption that this SCSI hard drive is good, I am trying to format it. See, I can't get into Windows to format it because it use to be a server computer and I don't know the password. So I deleted the partition and now I can't get anywhere. It just keeps trying to start Windows 2000 and then can't find the Kernel file so gives me that error. How can I partition it and install my own OS and get this darn thing working? I can't get the F10 prompt to work because it says "This utility does not support partitioning" or something to that effect. I will try installing that file you posted the link for. But how do I get it to read from the CD-rom? Because I have to burn it to a CD since obviously it's too big for a floppy.

[JohnWRuffo]

John:

The link I posted is just a way to configure the hardware if you do not have a SmartStart CD. You should not need it so long as you do not change the hardware configuration. (other than the drive)

You need to load the O/S without a SmartStart CD anyway, so you just need to FDISK (from the windows install) the whole SCSI drive and load windows 2000 Pro from the Windows2000 CD Media.

If the SCSI HDD is bad, better not try and use it. There are many drives that you can purchased on-line that are inexpensive and compatible.

If you are going to use this as a workstation, you will likely just need the Microsoft CD and the drivers from here:
http://h18023.www1.hp.com/support/files/server/us/locate/20_1131.html

Stick to the NIC, video and storage drivers if you need them. They are built for Win2K Server, but you should have very little trouble making them work with Win2K Pro.

Let me know if you need more help.
-john

[John_846]

Well, actually, it's going to get 98. I already have it and don't have 2000 so I don't see any point in shelling out the money for it since all I'm going to use it for is e-mail and what not.

But I did find out that the hard drive is bad, so unfortunately, I don't know what I'm going to do. I've got loads of IDE drives around but no SCSI drives. So I may have more questions, but not till I get another drive.