I received a call from a customer early yesterday morning that their HP DL140 G3 terminal server was down. I had them power the machine off and reboot but it would not come up so I quickly went to their site. When I powered the system on the system would POST OK but immediately after all the HW post and the O/S should begin to boot the monitor simply blanks out and the system does not boot.
I rebooted and was able to get into the raid bios configuration and it indicated that the drives and raid 1 configuration was fine. Calling HP support and fighting/arguing with them over what they should be doing (customer has a 24x7 4 hour response care pack but that is a whole other frustrating topic) I finally had to download an offline diagnostic for the machine (can't use a Smart CD with this machine) and proceeded to run several hours of diagnostics. At first they indicated that the drives were bad and would send out a technician with 2 new drives. After fighting with the technician to convince me that both drives had failed, I wanted to speak with someone at second level support. Support ffinally indicated that the errors in the diagnostic had nothing to due with the drives in question. Their final verdict was the hardware is all OK and I am now still left with a machine that will not boot but gives no indication of any O/S issues or error messages it just stops. Late before leaving yesterday I was able to download the raid driver and was able to boot the system with a Win 2003 CD using the F6 to use this driver to boot the system and get to the point in the installation where the boot can see that there is a copy of Windows in C:\Windows which is were I had to leave it. Has anyone had any similar circumstances or perhaps ideas on why the system would not throw any error messages and simply stop and not go any further after the HW post -- Thanks Dave Vantine ~ Finally, powerful endpoint security that ISN'T a resource hog! ~ ~ <http://www.sunbeltsoftware.com/Business/VIPRE-Enterprise/> ~
