ML370 (G1) CDROM boot issue

[Jason Antman]

Hello,

I recently had 2 drives in a 0+1 RAID fail on my ML370. I moved all services to other machines, and am looking to reinstall the OS and set it up as a development box. I pulled the two bad disks (now 4 disks instead of 6), booted SmartStart 5.50, ran system erase, and then configured from the start. I set it up as RAID5 with an online spare.

When I pulled the disks, I also replaced a PCI SCSI card (for external tape drive) with a second 3Com NIC, added the IML LCD display, and halved the RAM (from 2304 to 1152 Mb). All hardware was detected properly.

Booting from SmartStart ran fine. I added the system partition and configured everything. When finished, I entered the system partition utilities (F10) and told it to do an OS install, but it asks for diskettes. I'm trying to install openSuSE 10.2 from CD. I previously had openSuSE 10.1 on this machine, and it installed without a problem.

At the moment (you guessed it) it won't boot from the OS CD's. The last OS install, about 8 months ago, ran perfectly and I haven't changed any CDROM settings. I checked and reseated both ends of the cable. The OS CDs were burnt on the same drive as SmartStart, so I know it's not a drive speed issue.

I also went in and tried boot orders of A -> CD -> C and CD -> A -> C. I'm just getting "Non-system disk..." and nothing past that.

Boot seems fine, it recognizes 1152 Mb RAM, both processors, Smart Array 221 (rev. A v4.16) which is currently in Disk Consistency Initialization state, I get the F1/F10 prompt. Pressing F10 gives a prompt "Initializing MBA Press Ctrl+Alt+B to configure..." then "Press N to boot from Network" then the Non-System Disk Error.

Any tips? I've installed this OS on a few G1 proliants lately with no problems, and had installed an OS on this previously.

FYI this is a rack model, and the system configuration switch appears to be set as follows:
1 - off
2 - ON
3 - off
4 - off
5 - off
6 - off
7 - off
8 - ON
but I haven't changed it, and it worked fine last time.

Thanks,
Jason