OK I have 2 485's and they're both doing the same thing.

Im beyond the SMI USB boot, bought a cable and changed boot order. Restore runs fine and then goes into a boot loop where it never seems to do anything. If I select the USB drive during boot it will go into recovery mode, but selecting HDD sends it back into the loop.

Ive tried different drives (docked into a SATA drive dock, clear volumes reformat, chkdsk /r, all passes and healthy) and get the same issue. I'm interested in whatever advice anyone has up to and including lighter fluid and a match.

When your server reboots can you tell me what actually displays on your screen since you have a DEBUG Board. Some have reported strange behavior with the EX48x but most indicated the server reboots into recovery mode but your situation appears to be quite different.

One the other hand I have experienced a similar issue when I was working on one of my EX470's where it would begin the boot process then it would shut down and reboot. I actually caused the issue when I grabbed the wrong drive and inserted it into a port multiplier. Here I could see each drive being initialized and when the bad drive way being accessed the server would shut down and reboot over and over. So I pulled that drive only to find I installed a Drive that was known to be bad. When I installed the intended drive the server booted properly.

So I am curious about the condition of all the drives in the server. Now you also indicate that its happening in another server and while I know you have swapped system drives I wonder if the issue with the other server occurs when you move the drives from one server to the other. If I am correct about my suspicions then your just relocating the problem. If your server only has one drive the system drive then that's an entirely different thing but if it has multiple drives then could you back out all drives and boot from just one drive and see what if anything is different.

_________________
Exploring the possibilities!

Migrated from WHS2011 to WS2012E: HIGHLANDER

~ Norco 4220 Enclosure
~ Gigabyte GA-990FXA-UD5
~ AMD Phenom II X4 995 3.2 GHz
~ 8 GB Corsair Vengeance DDR3 1600 (PC3 12800)
~ 3 Supermicro AOC-SASLP-MV8

I have 2 EX485's

My drive inventory is:
2 x WD 80GB
1 x WD 250GB
1 x WD 2TB
1 x seagate 160GB
2 x Seagate 500GB
1 x Seagate 750GB
1 x Seagate 2TB

So far I've tried the two 80's, the 250, the 160, and one 500. I get the same crud each time. I get all the way through the restore and then on reboot I see POST hear the drive hit for a second, screen goes out and I see POST. Repeat ad naseum.

All of the drives have been cleared and had chkdsk /r run against them with only 1 saying that anything was repaired, and I've taken that out of circulation.

Does anyone have a copy of the HPMSSRecovery ISO for the 485 so I can verify that Im running the right recovery version, or any other suggestions?

Is it possible I have, through an alignment of the server stars, 2 bad/going bad power supplies, and that's why they wont boot with a drive in it but will boot to the on-board USB (not an electrician but I would assume the power requirements on the SMI USB are insignificant). I guess that wouldn't necessarily explain why it would go through the recovery unless the write process doesn't spin the drive enough to put a load on the power supply.

If I go through the recovery I can actually mount the drive that wont boot in the server using a SATA drive dock and see the OS and folders.

Am I missing something or going ?

Hard to say if its the PSU or not. Typically when a PSU is in trouble it will just shut down. While you have already gone through the CHKDSK process the next thing to look at is the actual health of the drives. I would download and install WindowSMART 2013 to one of your computers and have it check each of your drives out to see if the health of the drives are good or bad.

For more information on WindowSMART 2013 check out: http://www.dojonorthsoftware.net/

Also the manufactures of those drives have utilities to test the drives and running those utilities will help you to determine if there are other issues with the drives or not.

One thing I would do is push the drives aside and start off with a new single drive and perform a Factory Recovery using only that one drive. This would eliminate the drives you have and it will help you to determine what is actually going on. I can't comment on the actual Recovery Disk you are using if its correct for your EX48x or not. If your not sure you could always install another OS directly on the EX48x using an external optical drive to see if the OS will install or not. What your looking for is if the same conditions occur or not. The HP Recovery Software is specific to the model server. If you have 2 then you should have 2 sets of disks unless you purchased the units used and do not have the original disk sets and opted to download ISO's which could be anything and its hard to trust these files when they come from unknown sources. If you have original disks then they would be marked with the correct server for which they were intended.

If these servers were purchased used, how did you start using them? Were they already setup and you just ran them that way or did you have to recovery them and if so and it worked then you should have the correct disks if they were working fine before.

So there are some unknown variables here and so some history of the servers would be helpful.

_________________
Exploring the possibilities!

Migrated from WHS2011 to WS2012E: HIGHLANDER

~ Norco 4220 Enclosure
~ Gigabyte GA-990FXA-UD5
~ AMD Phenom II X4 995 3.2 GHz
~ 8 GB Corsair Vengeance DDR3 1600 (PC3 12800)
~ 3 Supermicro AOC-SASLP-MV8