Proliant 1600 is not powering on, please help..

[sabrang]

Hi guys,

I was given a PL1600 with two 9.1 GB ultra3 scsi. The problem was that it crashed and when rebooted went into a cycle of rebooting over and over again.

I am not a systems guy (its a very small company) but here is what I did.

I booted with a smartstart cd and ran System erase utility. After that I rebooted from the cd and was in the process of doing an assisted installation when the system froze up on me. After that the server does not boot from cd or floppy or anything. I power it on and it just stays like that. THe light flashes once on the hard drive - a red error light and thats it..

Can you please help..Thanks a ton in advance.

 

[ntinlin]

Try removing the HDD's and the RAID card if any.

Try removing all but one of the DIMMS, if that doesn't work try swapping the remaining DIMM with another.

When you power the system on does the led on the CD drive flash? If it does then it should mean the CPU is ok.

Do you see anything on the screen at all?

I suppose it is possible that your firmware has become corrupted somehow which would prevent booting but it is VERY unlikely.

 

[sabrang]

Thanks for your prompt response ntinlin.

Let me get this right.. I will remove the hard disk drives from the slots and also the memory modules(all but one) and then reboot.

Yes, when i reboot the led on the cd flashes and then nothing happens for what seems to be eternity. I do not see any thing on the screen. and I dont know what firmware is but lets hope that it is not corrupted.

I will try this in a few minutes and post again, please walk me through this guys, i shall ever be grateful.

Thanks a lot.

 

[sabrang]

Hi ntinlin,

I did as you suggested but no luck with anything. One thing I noticed this time, when I start the computer there is no "beep" sound which indicates the some POST condition I think..

I am going nuts here..

 

[Smorgan11]

could be one of the hard disks is faulty. Try another disk see if this makes a different. Also if you can get the bios up check to see what the boot order is

 

[Walter349]

1st thing is, if your getting power, (Green LED by pwr switch), then it is most likely a seating problem. Pull the CPU and System board cages and check the cable connections on the minibackplane, if all is good reseat the cages and pwr up again, if the problem persists, pull the HDDs and reboot, this should lead it to try getting a network boot, and provide the option to access the F10 config utility, at this point you can examine and test the hardware extensively.

 

[sabrang]

Hi guys, I got it to work..
Reseated the cages and stuff. but the key is that i was able to run with one dimm (i pulled out the other three just to check), i also pulled out the nic card from the i/o board. Now every thing is working fine and i used smartstart to reinstall my operating system.. it has been running for one day, no probs. now i will keep adding the dimms and see if it boots okay, and finally i will add the nic card and see if that was the problem.. thanks for the replies and keep up the good work..