Hi all,
We have a few Proliant DL380 G5 servers with P400 storage arrays. After an issue with the battery in the storage array for one of them we decided to upgrade firmware for the storage arrays and BIOS for all the servers. The firmware upgrades went fine and now they are all up to date with the BIOS and storage array firmwares.
However, booting problems started to appear with most of them some days/weeks later. POST checks are just fine but they fail to boot the operating system with this message:
Attempting Boot From Hard Drive (C:)
The operating system on all of them is Ubuntu Linux 12.04 and reinstalling GRUB2 to the MBR of the first logical drive, althought successfully, doesn't solve this issue. I have to mention these installations used to boot with no such problems with the same GRUB2 configuration. More so, for some of the servers this booting problem appeared intermittenly, only from time to time, not for every boot. And one of the servers is currently not booting from CD-ROM either (using the Virtual Media applet from iLO2).
Repeated checks with the SmartStart DVD find no issues, apparently. I've reverted the BIOS to the backup version on three of them (various older versions) with no success. I've tried to revert the storage array firmware too, as described at ftp://ftp.hp.com/pub/c-products/servers/management/smartstart/On-lineROMFlashUsersGuide.pdf in pages 37-38. But the procedure, although it appears to work, it doesn't downgrade the firmware. Using "bash -x" to execute the flashing command with the "-s -f" flags generates the attached output. If I flash the latest version (7.24, which doesn't require the "-s -f" flags), flashing works.
Please advise, I'm running out of ideas here. Thank you!