My Netserver 5/100 lh won't boot

[Steve J]

Someone gave me a Netserver 5/100 lh. My problem: I don't see the SCSI drive or CD-Rom showing up in the boot sequence (SCSI A and SCSI B has nothing showing up on them) and my floppy drive isn't reading the setup disk for NT let alone my ecu disk. Any suggestions?

Thanks in advance,
Steve

[Stuart Browne]

I'd start by eye-balling the cabling, making sure it is all in the appropriate place.

If the SCSI bus can't see the CD-ROM or hard disk, then something is probably un-plugged.

As for the Floppy drive not reading the diskette you put in it (does the light even come on?), the FDD is usually the first thing to die on any system!

To test that, you can just borrow your FDD out of your desktop (or another system) and plug it in. You should get the original test light upon power-up, and then trying to probe (assuming the boot-sequence says to probe the FDD) just before booting, then booting off it.

But yes, explore the system first. Find out why the SCSI channels can't see the devices. Check power-cables.

If you cna't find anything wrong, then try re-seating cabling (unplugging, plugging back in). Moving equiptment around sometimes has strange affects on cabling.

[Steve J]

Thanks Stuart.

The floppy does do an initial read but does not follow up. It just goes on to boot til it say "no operating system found". I will try another floppy drive though just to make sure.

I checked the cables but I will do as I do my desktop, rip the whole thing apart and reattach all the cables, when it goes out on me.

I'll let you know how it goes.

[Ricardo Rocha]

Have you seen the bootable devices in BIOS? Maybe you should upgrade your BIOS

[Steve J]

Ricardo,

The bios disk in the pouch was 4.0.15 pe. I'm looking for a newer version now. But one of the problems I'm having is that the computer won't even boot that disk, let alone the HD.

On my computer at home, I took the option of booting from the floppy out of the startup sequence (in the cmos, where you only gotta hit the "del" key (wish it were that easy)). Is there something like that in this computer? (And I bet it's on that disk too.) Could that be my problem?

[Greg Carlson · Accepted solution]

Steve,

My first recommendation to you since you are having problems even booting to a floppy would be to...

Clear the CMOS by flipping switch 3 on the system board to ON -> then power on the server until you get a message that your config has been cleared. Power the server back off and flip switch 3 back to the off position. Then try to boot to either the ECU diskette or the BIOS flash diskette that you recreate from the download page. Make sure that you aren't saving the files directly to diskette because those will not be bootable diskettes. Save the files to your hdd and then extract them to the floppies and boot the server. Clearing CMOS could resolve your issue. If there is still no change you could have a bad floppy drive so I would try another fdd.

Just incase the url for the ECU and BIOS aren't on earlier posts.. go here for the files.. : http://www.hp.com/cposupport/swindexes/nslhpl5_swen.html

Good luck,
Greg

[Steve J]

Thanks Greg. I'm a happy camper!
It's exactly what I was looking for. Worked like a charm.

Stuart - there was a bad cable to the HD as well. Replaced, now in business.

Thanks everyone for the heap o' help.