Re: Booting Proliant 800 - SOLVED

[Peter Teunissen <oneman@onemanifest.net>]

On 24-dec-2005, at 17:43, Peter Teunissen wrote:

> On 23-dec-2005, at 22:58, Raquel Rice wrote:
>
> > On Fri, 23 Dec 2005 22:22:49 +0100
> > Peter Teunissen <oneman@onemanifest.net> wrote:
> >
> > > Hi All,
> > >
> > >
> > > I've just bought a cheap Proliant 800 PII 450 and would like to
> > > install Debian on it. But it will not boot anything. It only tries
> > > to   boot from a damaged Windoze NT install on it's disks but
> > > fails after   the initial bootloader sequence.
> > > I've tried booting without any result:
> > > - sarge installer CD
> > > - Sarge bootfloppy
> > > - HP Smartstart 5.50
> > >
> > > It simply ignores the floppy or CD and start booting from disk.
> > >
> > > Even the setup utility (F10) results in a message: 'System
> > > partition   utilities not available on this system'
> > >
> > > I've googled but couldn't find info on how to setup this system to
> > >
> > > boot a Linux installer.
> > >
> > > Does anyone have information on onstalling Debian on this system
> > > or   pointers to good info?
> >
> > Have you changed the bios so it will boot from the floppy or the CD?
> That's what I'd like to do. But as far as I could learn from the HP  
> site is that this can either be done from the smartstart CD  
> (doesn't boot) of by pushing F9 (don't get this option during boot)  
> or F10 (get error message above) Does anyone know of another manner  
> to access the bios?

In the end the solution was quite simple. Since the bios had been  
setup to boot from disk as primary choice and couldn't be accessed in  
any way, I simply removed the scsi disks and voila, it booted the HP  
Smartstart CD. I could then do a system erase and setup the system  
for manual Linux install. It's installed now and performs much faster  
then I expected!

Thanks to all who responded!

Peter