I believe I know the answer to this, but let me see if anyone else has any better troubleshooting ideas:
We have a Dell PE 2850 with a RAID 5 on the internal PERC SCSI card. Did the MS Updates and now it won't boot. The display is blank, but the lights on the front come on and the hard drives flash with activity. The small status display on the server doesn't show any errors. No beeps, nothing.
We pulled the memory and booted. We got the error beeps then, but still no display.
I have a duplicate PE 2850 that we are not using. I am offsite, so I had someone pull the controller (riser) and the drives and put it in the open server. Gets through POST and to the CRTL-M for the SCSI Controller. Drives show online, but no logical drives. I read that this particular raid controller (LSI PERC) keeps a bit of the RAID info on the drives themselves. I am just hoping that my onsite help plugged the drives in the correct order. She is certain that she did.
As for the failed machine, we tried trading the memory from the other machine, trading the power supplies (it has redundant), and swapping the riser. I have a feeling it's the motherboard. One site even suggested leaving the power unplugged for "1-24 hours". Did that over the weekend and still nothing.
I haven't tried swapping the backplane yet. I believe i will be onsite Wednesday as we do need this data. I was very careful making sure my help did not hit the initialize drives!
Thanks, for any ideas/input.
David