DL360 G3 RAID Controller appears to be dead, but is it the RAID controller?

[foxofinfinety]

I am currently doing an ICT training, and we have a few older HP servers to train on.

Mainly 5 HP ProLiant DL360 Generation 3.

One of them, has a bit problem, mainly it can't finish initializing the RAID volume.

Almost all the others in the group say the RAID controller died.

But I personally have a hard time to believe that is really is the controller.

Since we do this as a form of homework there is no really permanent place for these five servers to stay,

so they are moved quite a lot, according to the others the I/O Processor died because the server was moved to much.

Although this suddenly is not exceptionally good for these machines, but I can't help but wonder why the I/O processor died,

while leaving the rest of the mainboard and even the drives perfectly intact.

I have seen HD's die much quicker then the HDD's, and over the last three year I have worked with these five servers which at that time have been used as Citrix servers (4 of them) and an IIS server (the last one).

It has happened once before that the backplane on one of these died, and it looks exceptionally similar to the situation then.

I have also noticed that only one of the two drives indicates an error, but, if the controller is dead, shouldn't they both show an error?

since it seems more like only one of the two drives can't be found now.

Which makes me wonder, what is more likely? That the Smart Array 5i plus died, or that the backplane did?

and, more interesting, is there a way to test out which it is?

At this point, the machine won't boot, as it gets stuck while trying to initialize the RAID.

While starting the controller uses the characters | / - \  and loops them to show sort of a spinner.

On most we get five of these "spinners" before the system go's on, but with this one, we get 7, and it won't continue.

I have searched a bit to find a way to test, but they all begin with "boot the system from CD-ROM",

but right now it won't boot from anything.