Proliant 1600 (P08) will not accept or boot from CDROM

[Elliott Scott]

If I insert a CDROM into the drive, the system will pause for a moment and then eject the CDROM. I know the CDROM drive hardware is good because I have replaced it with a known working drive. I cannot boot from CDROM, nor will the system allow a CDROM to stay in the drive. Diagnostics do not indicate that there is a failure of any kind. The system has been upgraded to the latest version of the firmware, but this did not change the condition.

[Bryan Eley]

A couple of questions:

1. Can you boot off a diskette? If not, did the system security settings (Security Management) in the BIOS get changed to prevent diskette/cdrom boot control? I also recall reading about a certain switch 4 on the motherboard (?) affecting boot behavior that MIGHT enable/disable diskette/cd booting. Also check out the forum thread http://forums1.itrc.hp.com/service/forums/questionanswer.do?threadId=886163
to see if this is similar to what you are trying to do.
2. Is the IDE cable for the cdrom on the controller board end snugly attached and oriented correctly? Admittedly, this is highly unlikely, as I know that newer ide cable connectors have a notch to orient the pins correctly, but thought I'd suggest it nonetheless in the event an older cable is present or got switched in.

3. Did you add any memory recently? I seem to recall seeing cdrom issues on a 1660 from a bad or at least incompatible memory stick.