Has anybody set up a Proliant 3000 with floppies?

[kev82]

I'm relativly new to Compaqs and when I got this machine(Proliant 3000 rackmount) a few months ago I booted from SmartStart and followed the instructions and set it up quite easily.

I wanted to completely change the drive configuration so I figured the easiest thing to do would be to do a system erase and start from scratch. I tried to boot from SmartStart but the original Compaq CD-ROM drive in the box had died. I tried various replacement drives, most wouldn't boot anything but one booted everything apart from SmartStart, so I figured I could set up the machine with floppies and then put the operating system back with this new drive. As you can guess from the thread title I'm not having much success with this approach.

The system erase disk functioned perfectly and quite happily destroyed the array configuration. The system configuration disks work perfectly, they detect everything and set the boot controller to the array. However, if I load up the system configuration again it says that there is a problem with the primary fixed disk. I then go to array configuration which says it can't detect the array. It says that a possible reason is that the array contains no logical drives(maybe I'm just being stupid here but this seems a bit like the chicken and the egg) How am I supposed to create a logical drive without running the array configuration utility?

I doubt there is anything wrong with the array hardware because it was running perfectly before I did a system erase.

I have tried running the array configuration utility in every way possible, I even put a scsi disk on the machines normal scsi bus, installed windows 2000 on it and installed the utility, I still get the same error, it can't detect the array.

Any help on either getting the computer to boot into smartstart, or a method of configuring the array would be great.

If it's of any use the system bios is dated 10/08/2000 and the SmartArray 3200 has bios version 4.52-Rev A.

 

[TheLad]

What version of the SmartStart disks are you using? You will have to use SmartStart v5.5 or previous for a Proliant 3000

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[kev82]

Yes, it was SmartSmart v5.50. As I said, when I first set up the machine I booted from the CD and set it up no problems. The problem is now caused because the original Compaq CD-ROM drive no longer works, and the other drives refuse to boot the SmartStart cd.

 

[ntinlin]

When I've had to replace Compaq CD drives in older servers I've had similar problems if the drives were more than 8x.

Try a 4x or 8x (if you can find one) and see if that makes any difference.

Neill

 

[kev82]

Tried all the cd-drives I have but didn't work. Have solved it by putting the array controller card in another computer and installing the array configuration utility on there. I am still confused as to why this didn't work on the server itsself when I installed Win2k on a drive connected to the main scsi bus.