CX300 won't boot

The Fault light on the SP blinks when booting up - the frequency of the blinks indicates the state of the boot process.

Stages:

1. once/4 seconds — BIOS activity.

2. once/second — POST activity.

3. four/second — booting.

Steady indicates fault

If the blinks stay in one stage, that indicates a problem in that stage. If the lights are blinking at the rate of one blink every four seconds, that means the BIOS activity has discovered an error and will not proceed to the next stage. If both fault lights on each SP are stuck in the same stage (BIOS), that may indicate a problem with the getting to the next stage (POST) where access to the Vault (or the OS) drives come into play. This may indicate a problem in the disks. and will probably require someone to troubleshoot the issue as you may have an issue with the Vault disks, or image on the vault disks.

SPA uses disks 0 for booting the array OS (disk 2 is a mirror of disk 0).

SPB uses disks 1 for booting the array OS (disk 3 is a mirror of disk 0).

You could power off the array, then remove all but the first disk (disk 0) in the DPE (first set of disks) and disconnect any other DAE's (remember to label the DAE cables so that you get the cables back in the correct position) and remove SPB, then power on just SPA - if that boots, you will still get some faults as the other SP is removed and the disks are all removed except for disk 0, but at least you could see if the SP will boot. You could then try the same steps with SPB and its boot disk (disk 1) and see if SPB boots. 

glen

Glen, thanks a lot for your answer. Will try to do that tomorrow.

Glen, tried the thing you've suggested - no luck.

When I power on the box the HDD lights with steady amber, the green LED blinks a couple of times and becoms steady too.

No output through hyper terminal.

Tried this on both SPs with the other pulled out and one HDD in array - 0 for SPA and 1 for SPB

Miromix, Can you please brief us what was the last action you made before having this issue?

Also, in your case, I will do what Glen recommended. I will first remove both SPs while the array is powered off then i will reseat SPA first and try to boot. if that was not successful then i will go for other alternatives like installing recovery image or so.

Hope that helps

Mohammed Salem  @yankoora

Mohammed, nothing special was done to the box. It just stood powered off for a year.

What other alternatives are you talking about? I cannot get access to SPs through Hyper Terminal...

The correct connection setting is detailed in this post:

https://community.emc.com/docs/DOC-8449

Hope that helps

Mohammed Salem  @yankoora

In my old laptop "with serial port"  I connected to a CX3-20 array using this settings 9600-8-N-1-N and it worked fine

Hope that helps

Mohammed Salem  @yankoora

Mohammed, I am using the exact same settings on my old XP laptop. The cable is from CX300 box. I tested the cable on working CX500 system and its okay. Both systems are using the same cable (found on powerlink)

And I still have no connection to SP in HyperTerminal.

Sure. This was the first thing I tried

Hi

Have you tried to reseat the SP's, PSU, and flare drives ?

Just to be sure, the Fault light - the top light - is the one that should blink when the SP is powering on. See if you can detect the blink rate as noted in my earlier post.

glen

Glen, the Power Light is green and the Fault Light blinks every 4 seconds. The lights on HDD are both on - green and amber - and they just stay on. Trying to connect via terminal (9600, 8bits, no parity, stop bits - 1, no flow control) - nothing happens.

The system powered on for hours and the situation remains...

Any thoughts?

Sorry for the late reply - it the fault light blinks once every four seconds, that means the first part of the BIOS load is failing. This usually means that the BIOS is not working. This would require a service request to EMC to troubleshoot further.

Does this occur with both SP's is you try to start up with only one SP installed?

glen