CD-ROM drive inaccessible during OS load?

[Mike Stem]

Compaq ProLiant ML350 circa year 2000
SN: 6J13FSJ1P003

I have installed four new SCSI drives on a SmartArray 4321 Controller and am trying to load the Windows Server 2003 OS. I have tried everything I can think of and cannot get the system to boot from the CD drive. Even replaced drive with a known good drive and cable, verified that drive is set to CD and the drive is installed on Drive 0 portion of cable. Cable attached to PRI IDE on MB, that port is active in BIOS. Also have tried every possible combo in the ROMBased Setup Utility for boot drive, still no joy. When the server goes through POST the CD drive is accessed (light glows) and of course power is applied to drive. System will boot from floppy if a disk is inserted. But it refuses to find the CD, bootable of course!

When In BIOS Setup I have four (4) boot contollers listed; the 431 SmartArray, PCI Embedded IDE Ctlr, and then Compaq Dual-Wide Ultra 3 Port 1 and 2. The PCI Embedded IDE is in location #2 and it will not let me change it. the other three contollers can be assigned any order of 1, 3 and 4. But IDE is apparently locked into position 2?

Would appreciate any and all advice! We had this server running with W2K03 and it worked great, it does duty as a backup file server. When we put the new bare drives in and tried to rebuild we ran into the issue with CD drive not being recognized at boot time. Any ideas?

Mike

Just in case it helps, here is what is on the box.

ProLiant ML350 (original version)
BIOS D04/F04 11/15/2002
ROMBased Setup Utility ver 1.0 2002

[Ryan Goff]

Will it boot to other media ok? Like the Firmware Maintenance CD here:

http://h18023.www1.hp.com/support/files/server/us/download/27225.html

The boot controller order you mention should have the 431 first if you plan to install the OS there.

The "standard boot order" should be cdrom first.

Is this a retail copy of Windows you are using or a custom or multi-os cd?

If you put the windows cd into a desktop does the desktop boot to it ok?

[Mike Stem]

Thanks Ryan for the quick reply.
I have tried the SmartStart CD and the Windows Server CD in other machines. They boot fine, and the files can be accessed no problem. NOTHING is recognized when I put any bootable CD in the CD-ROM drive of the ML350. Frustrating, because as mentioned above the CD drive activity light will light during POST. But the server never recognizes any disc in the CD drive?

[Ryan Goff]

There might be something wrong with the cable or the controller, basically the communications between the cdrom and the systemboard itself.

Did the CDrom work with the previous OS install inside windows?

If you can boot to dos bootable diskette with cdrom drivers and not see the cdrom, it may be controller/cable issue.

Have you tried manually resetting bios using the jumper on the systemboard?

Here is the service guide, the process is on page 137.

http://h20000.www2.hp.com/bc/docs/support/SupportManual/c00099095/c00099095.pdf

If that doesn't work do you have another standard ide cable you can run to the cdrom?

[Mike Stem]

Thanks for the feedback. I will try the suggestions and report back to the Forum. Now that I think about it, I even tried booting with an old Win98 boot disk. You know the drill where it tries to load the ATAPI driver and access the CD-ROM drive? That failed, it couldn't locate a drive... maybe a clue, eh?!

[Mike Stem]

{Followup}
We tried a second cable last evening and it worked! Hard to believe two bad cables in a row, or maybe just bad karma... anyway, now boots to CD and there is joy all around. Appreciate your assistance, thank you!