ML350 G3 - Attempting to boot from hard drive (c:) - hanging

[southern]

Hi all!

First of all I'm new to HP brand servers, so pls excuse me...

Right now I got ML350 G3 and the first step I've taken that I upgraded each firmware successfully with Firmware Maintenance 8.00.

In next step I setup Debian etch and after reboot it is always hanging with:
[two short beeps]
"Attempting to boot from CD-ROM"
"Attempting to boot from hard drive (c:)"

I've got 6x36gb scsi disks on SmartArray 532 in raid 0 + 1 mode and 1x10gb pata disk.
(I've tried with SA5302 controller but the same...")

- In the OS selection (RBSU) I selected the 'Linux' option
- the boot controller is set to SA532
- the boot order is (1)cd-rom (2) hard drive (3) nic (4) floppy

My question is how can I bypass this message and boot correctly and get grub?

Thanks in advance,
southern

[Brian_Murdoch · Accepted solution]

Hi,

The double beep before booting suggests that the Power-On-Self-Test (POST) is OK on the server so harware is generally good at this point.

It may be a smart array driver issue so can you try the following just to eliminate the drive backplane and disks etc.

Remove the point to point SCSI cable from the Smart Array controller end and attach it to the embedded SCSI on the system board (either port will do). Don't use a cable with a terminator as the backplane is self terminating - always use the point to point to the backplane.

Now you won't have any raid capability since the embedded controller is just a SCSI controller but on POST you should see all the disks reported as attached to the embedded controller and their model names and ID's etc.

You could build Debian on one of these disks (Say SCSI ID0) and see if that works. If it boots OK then the problem lies with the Debian/Smart Array side.

I don't know a lot about Linux but I believe you can also build a LILO diskette to bypass the problem and boot the raid disks if there is an issue with the boot block - similar to NT4 issues a while back with the master boot record being corrupt.

I hope this helps.

Brian

[southern]

Hi Brian,

Thanks for fast reply. I'm going to try it tomorrow :)

southern

[southern]

Hi Brian,

Backplane and the controllers are in mint condition... so there was problem with MBR. An ubuntu live disc solved it (grub-install /dev/cciss/c0d0p1)

Big thanks from far far Hungary :)

southern

[southern]

solved