Hello Geeks,

I have been loading Red Hat OS 5.5 x86_64 version in HP's Proliant DL 380 G7. One of the Server's after triggering the iLO and setting the Server to the determine the hostname so that, it can check the eth0 settings and then it probes for the video adapter, the screen goes completely blue and the characters that are on the screen at this point are not readable at all..Looks like to me the screen is throwing the system characters completely leaving no trace of what's going on. The screen is blue with those characters and the server is freezing...Looks like a hardware iLO issue, but not sure.

When I restarted the server, it picked up the PXE boot and loaded windows upto the serial key and all that loading process was readable.

Anybody else got this error or any thoughts on this please...sorry for the length of message.

Thanks in advance

Just to clarify, You are only monitoring the system via the iLO?
Have you tried booting with a screen attached and seeing what you get rather than using the iLO's virtual terminal?
Do you get the HP Splash screen, all the POST messages, SmartArray initialisation, SCSI channel scans, etc before the blue screen? Answers on a postcard please...

Play Bonny

Thank you for responding, and yes I am seeing all the post messages that say Proliant DL 380G7 and then run through the standard checks. And it even showed me the list of nic cards that I should boot the OS with. After selecting the NIC1 card,it booted and then showed the same blue screen error before the hostname is assigned to the server. Told the H/W guys to look into it, they tell that everything seems to be fine. All the other server with the same iso loaded perfectly before and after loading this server. I guess as you said, got to go to the data center and look into this. But I don't think that would resolve this. Still thinking why in the World should it throw such a strange error where characters are not even readable and hard to figure out the issue. Even big lords over here are also working on this, but as I am building it, feel upset and this is the last one for this project.

Thank you again, please let me know if you get any further ideas on this. Thank you for your time.

So you're doing a network boot rather than from the SmartArray? I don't think I'm following this. Where did you install the Red Hat? If it's installed on the RAID you'll have to change the BIOS to get it to boot from the SmartArray controller. A PXE boot is over the network which means it's looking there for an bootable image, not a disk. What's it likely to see? Anything?

Play Bonny!

Ok, I can give a clear idea on this. Usually we kick-off the config file from our main page that will perform a power-cycle-boot on the iLO and when the iLO wakes up, this config file provides with mini boot image of initrd & boot.ini which do the initial process (kind of initial boot I'm guessing), after which the hostname is determined from the config file and then the http path for the load on the main base server is pulled in from the config file. At this point the script from the config file asks us trough what ethernet adapter you want to install the OS, and then I select, eth0. When this is pulled in, the server loads the iso images and starts the OS load process.

If we don't kick-off this config file and if we manually power up the server just by clicking the momentary press in iLO, then the server is powering up and is picking up the PXE boot where it is finding this Windows OS and is trying to load it. To eliminate this, I disabled the PXE in most of the servers and they get loaded properly with Linux properly. (The reason I tried PXE boot was just to know whether it was a complete h/w problem or not! But as windows is trying to load and we can read the on screen process, this is something relaed to Linux and the serever h/w). Did the same for this one too, but this one pops up that unreadable error. When I cheked the iLO screen now, I got the server froze at the "Welcome to the Redhat Linux" blue screen & the screen is readable as of now. Don't know what happened. But its definitely not furthering to the next screen.It froze there. All h/w drivers are also up to date.

Still trying to figure out what can be done through iLO if at all!! to resolve this.

Again, thank you much for your time.

How can we capture all the logs of the ongoing installation on a DL 380G7 box, so that we can trace out the issue of why this screen is displaying unknown content and then the server gets hanged-up.

Any thoughts please, still could find a resolution for this!