Proliant DL160 G5 health led blinking red

[dasch14]

Hi everyone,

First of all I apologize for my English, it's not my mother language and I'll try my best to make you understand my problem. I've bought an DL160 G5 a year ago, on the second hand market. I upgraded it, 2 Intel Xeon X5472 processors, 12 GB FB 800 MHz ram, and 4 Samsung Spinpoint F1 320 GB (HD322HJ).
It worked well until yesterday, fans were getting really loud, and I decided to reboot the system. I didn't see any red led blinking because I rebooted it with VNC so I wasn't in the same room when the server was noisy. The server rebooted but during the first page of BIOS the led, normally green, blink twice red, and become green again. When the server come to the Ethernet boot agent page (press ctrl+s) fans speed decrease (as usual) but 1 or 2 second after that the server put itself on hibernation (power led amber) and the health led is blinking red. I tried to clear CMOS, check fans, try with only one ram dimm, one processor, no HDD, but results are always the same. When I disconnect a fan a POST error message appears (Fan 6 disconnected, or airflow insufficient), helping me to know what is the problem. Here there is no POST error message, I can't access to the OS, to the BIOS menu, so I'm a bit confused and I can't find the problem.

Does anyone have any solution for me ?
Thank you
Damien

[Skotte]

Hi Damien,

The External Health led blinking red and Power solid amber generally indicates a problem with the power supply to the server in one shape or form.

Since the fans were noisy, it is a possibility that the server overheated and damaged the PSU, as your setup should draw circa 390 - 440 (of a maximum of 650) watts under some load, but I am just speculating.

If you have configured Lights out, you can view the errors which were logged on the system which caused the failure and take appropriate action.

Since you have broken the server down to the bare minimum configuration as part of the testing, if this is the original power supply for this machine, it's had a good run, and truth be told, probably needed to be replaced during the upgrade if the power consumption has increased to any great degree.

HTH

Cheers

Leon

[dasch14]

Hi,

Thanks for the reply, I doubt that PSU is faulty because I can nearly boot and it's start blinking red before the power led become amber, but I will check it. I don't know if I can plug in any other PSU onto the motherboard but if it's possible I'll try it, and it would avoid me to pay another PSU if the first one is still good.

[Skotte]

One thing I forgot to mention is attempt to replace the IEC cable.