SS-4200-E won't restart

[idata]

It was running fine and I enabled SSH and let it restart. Now it stays in flashing-power-button-land forever. If I try to hold down the reset button on startup, the unit powers down before resetting.

[Daniel_O_Intel]

Did you see

http://www.intel.com/support/motherboards/server/ss4200-e/sb/CS-030189.htm

?

[idata]

Yes. Maybe I'm wrong, but I don't see how that is relevant to my problem.

I cleared the MBR of a couple of disks that I had that were on the approved list and installed them. The unit ran fine for about a day. I added a couple of new disks, rebuilt the array and updated the firmware. It ran fine for another day or so. I enabled nfs and all was OK. I enabled ssh and attempted the required restart. It never successfully booted again.

I also find it troubling that the reset button no longer seems to work. As I mentioned above, if I hold the reset & power buttons down, it comes up and then after a second or so powers back down.

Thanks for your response. I can pull the disks and wipe them again, if that's really the problem but I don't see why that would be the case.

[idata]

One thing I forgot to mention is that when it is failing to boot the drive lights are dark when the power button is flashing. When I naively installed disks without erasing their mbrs, the disk lights were steady while the power button flashed.

[Daniel_O_Intel]

Only the Power/Status Pushbutton LED is Flashing blue?

I have seen reports where the power button stays flashing blue, but still becomes accessible across the network. Have you tried letting it sit there for a couple minutes, then pinging it?

If not, you can try using the recovery firmware at

http://downloadcenter.intel.com/Detail_Desc.aspx?agr=Y&DwnldID=15845

[idata]

Thanks. I'm downloading the firmware now. I haven't been able to get the reset button to work, but I'll give it a shot.

In the meantime, I've ordered an RS-232 cable so that I can get to the BIOS and change the $&# *($&# ) boot order.

[idata]

The unit will not start up with me holding the power & reset buttons. It powers down after a couple of seconds. Am I hosed?

[Daniel_O_Intel]

Possibly - if it's shutting off like that, there might be a power supply issue. Does it do the same thing with all the HDs temporarily removed?

About the only other thing I can think of, to get more information, is to use the RS-232 (serial) cable connection to watch the boot process, see if there's another clue in there.

[idata]

Thanks, Dan. Since the unit is new, I'm just going to send it back and let them deal with it. Chances are it's defective, but it's so opaque to deal with it's very maddening.