FreeBSD v6.2-RELEASE with Compaq ProLiant 6400R

[jonathan michaels]

greetings all,

i recently acquired a few Compaq ProLiant 6400r (4 gb dram, 4x fxp0
10/100 mhz nic, four PIII 500/100 mhz cpu with l2 cache of 1 Mb and
Compaq smart array 221 scsi raid array controller), this machine shares
the load with a similarly configured Compaq ProLiant 5500R. the raid is
built from 4x36 gb Fujitsu 10K rpm scsi III hard disks, as a single
'drive' (striped i think) backed up to DLT-7000 tape streamer.

both these machines are running freebsd v6.2-release both run
flawlessly once up and running .. the problems is with the ProLiant
6400R and freebsd (-release, versions 6.2, 6.1, 6.0, 5.2, 4.6, 4.4 and
4.2) once the machine is booted from the proprietary HP "SmartStart"
cdrom to configure the host, freebsd works a real treat and has really
good uptime, even on my poorish power but once i power down the
machine for any reason it will not restart on the installed freebsd
filesystems .. these machines (5500r/6400r) were ms win 2003 servers
and i reconfigured them both to use unix (Solaris/unixware in teh
configuration part of teh initial startup process).

i've Google'd, but, nothing like this is even mentioned, hinted at, i
meant to say. MS Windows runs flawlessly as does FreeBSD once its booted,
getting to to teh boot stage is the problem .. all that happens is teh
light on teh cdrom turns yellow and the machine just sits there,
waiting .. if it matters there is no MS Windows/Compaq ProLiant
diagnostic tools filesystem on the raid/hard disk array setup.

i have several ProLiant (as well as several 6400r's) and all work very
well with freebsd.

can anyone help, suggest, i have also down-load some of teh relevant
doc's on teh HP/Compaq web-site and read, read and more read ...

most kind regards/appreciations

jonathan

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