Hi All,

Creating a new topic after my original post appearing under "Need help from people with VGA cable". (If I try to put a link in THIS post to it I get, "Newly registered users are not allowed to post links" so I guess I'm still too "new.")

I have the VOV VGA/PS2/serial cable assembly now.

I know from Mr. Kuretz's reply to my original post that it doesn't make a difference what the BIOS boot order specifies: "it is hard coded to boot off the bottom rear USB slot first, then bottom hard drive, then onboard USB flash."

I was able to get the Amahi 6.1 (Fedora 14) distro installed (used the Express CD disc) from a USB CD drive (bottom rear USB port). It finished installing successfully to the point of the first reboot. I removed the USB CD drive as it was no longer needed. On rebooting, the EX470 just kept rebooting into Amahi because (I later realized) the device enumeration had changed and it couldn't finish the install. If I remember right, Amahi thought it was supposed to be running off of /dev/sda but instead it was now /dev/sdb. The SMI USB flash was /dev/sda.

I put the USB CD drive back on with a copy of System Rescue CD 2.40, but it kept booting off the hard drive instead of off the CD. Removing the hard drive got me past that and booting off the CD again.

Since it seemed like the SMI USB at /dev/sda was contributing to the problem and there didn't seem to be a way to disable it, I decided to make a 'dd' image copy of it for safe keeping, then proceeded to do a GRUB Legacy install on it. The goal was to use GRUB to boot the distro on the main hard drive, and maybe later put memtest on the SMI USB flash drive as well. GRUB said it installed successfully to the onboard SMI USB drive.

Right now:

1) After a normal power on (no paperclip applied) with no hard drive and no USB devices connected, I'm not able to get past POST (hangs after showing amount and type of RAM) and can't enter BIOS setup by hitting DEL on attached PS/2 keyboard. Health indicator is a steady purple almost immediately after power on.

2) If I power on with paperclip held in place and then remove it once the health light starts blinking, the Award BootBlock BIOS screen appears and hangs.

3) Same as #2 except I put in a 16GB USB thumb drive containing a 'dd' image of the original SMI USB drive. This time I get, "Detecting USB floppy drive media..." After several minutes of no activity I remove the thumb drive and see displayed on the next line, "Error loading operating system". Health light is off.

Question #1: I'd like to try clearing the CMOS settings to see if it would help me complete POST, but I've not been able to find the steps to do so. I think I can handle fixing the Amahi install if I can boot off the USB CD drive again. Can anyone supply steps for clearing CMOS on an EX470?

Question #2: Should installing GRUB Legacy on the SMI USB drive work? I have no need for the original WHS-related SMI USB contents to be there any more.

Question #3: In one of my original attempts to fix the Amahi install, I tried duplicating the success I'd had with booting from the USB CD drive, but it kept booting off the hard drive instead. Doesn't this mean the boot order is hardcoded to be a) hard drive, b) bottom rear USB port and finally c) SMI USB flash?

What I do have ready to go is a 16GB thumb drive with the original SMI USB flash drive contents put on it via 'dd'. The EX470 just won't get past POST so I'm unable to determine if the thumb drive will boot OK.

It's the wee hours of the morning and I've probably left out some details of what I've tried already. So it's time to post this and get some sleep.

I followed the steps in the first post of this thread to clear the CMOS settings:



I left the power unplugged and the CMOS battery out overnight. No joy. Now, I know the above thread is for an EX490 and not the EX470 I have, but I figured I had nothing to lose.

1. So I'm still at the same point of not being able to try clearing the CMOS to see if that will allow POST to complete.

2. As far as the SMI USB drive contents that I 'dd' copied to a 16G thumb drive, it doesn't boot in another computer. I remember -- back when I still had a bootable EX470 -- that Linux 'fdisk -l' did not show it as having a normal DOS partition table -- there were no partition table entries listed at all. I realize this might not prove anything, that maybe the SMI USB drive's Windows PE environment is just like that. But I also have read threads like this one that includes screen captures of the files. So, it sure seems to me like it should have regular FAT partitions. After reading the different posts with big warnings about not touching the SMI USB contents, I made sure I did the 'dd' image copy of it first.

Quite stupidly I have found myself in the same situation as you. Basically this is what I have figured out. Since we have changed the partition table of the SMI USB the ex47x will no longer boot. If we could get the SMI USB back to a FAT partition the systems would probably boot. The only access I have is usb floppy drive with boot disks from the award bios bootblock. If some genius creates a floppy boot disk that can load the usb drivers for the SMI USB and allow the partition to be changed then we can unbrick our servers. Otherwise, dead in the water.

Hi drboogie,

At last someone else I can commiserate with. I'd be curious to know how the partition table on your SMI USB got changed? Do you think whatever you need to write back to the SMI USB would fit on a bootable USB floppy?

I had some success with this post that talks about shorting two pins on the flash drive (chip) located on the underside of the motherboard. It got past POST and I was able to enter the BIOS to load and save the optimized defaults. I was able to boot from a System Rescue CD. It has been a while since I tried this so I probably am not recalling all the details of my last attempt -- it's back to not being able to finish POST. I believe I had done a dd restore to the SMI USB drive, from the backup I had made before things stopped working.

In using a hex editor on the dd backup file I created, it looks to me like the contents are still all there, but just the partition table is wiped out. What I think would help me is if I could have some kind soul send me an attachment of the first 512 bytes of their working SMI USB drive.

I was working on getting ZFSGuru installed with AFP support and selected the SMI USB to be formatted in a GUID partition to be added to the ZFS pool ( ). Next reboot, the MSS was lost. The issue with using a floppy is indeed space, but also the use of usb drivers in the boot disk cause the usb floppy to be reinitialized and lost to the boot environ. I will read up on the post that got you to boot from a CD, I think if I could get Hiren's BCD to load the lite winxp that is on it I may have a chance to reformat/repartition the SMI.

Sweet Lord Jebus I fixed it!

Go here -> http://www.hirensbootcd.org/download/
Burn the iso and boot from it using the shorted pins method in your last post.
NOTE: I had to use a SATA cdrom as the USB cdrom didn't boot, maybe due to the shorted pins?
Run the mini windows xp option off the boot loader and let it load
open the HBCD menu and open the programs menu
select partition/boot/mbr then run disk genius
Select the SMI USB disk and convert to MBR instead of GPT and save your settings before closing
I also right clicked "My Computer" and opened disk management and deleted the old partition and repartitioned.
Rebooted to Hiren's without shorting the pins!

Time for a Thanks to TAA, ndenev, and

Hi drboogie,

Glad to read you got it working! This is encouraging news for my own box.


When the USB cdrom didn't boot, did you get an error or did it ignore the USB cdrom completely and try to boot from the hard disk instead?

If I power on with the bottom rear USB port having either a bootable flash drive (UBCD4WIN) or a bootable Hiren's CD, POST stops at the point of detecting the CPU. If I don't have anything plugged in to the USB port, POST gets a little further but doesn't get beyond detecting the RAM.

Shorting the two SMI USB chip data pins makes no difference with either a bootable USB device or an empty USB port; POST stops as described above.

Did you connect the SATA cdrom to the external SATA port, or to the bottom SATA port on the backplane?


So do you have one formatted partition on the SMI USB of type FAT16 (FAT32?), and not flagged as bootable, but otherwise the partition is completely empty? In other words, you didn't have to put back all the files that ship on the SMI USB?

When I booted it with the pins shorted the mss booted straight to the harddrive or tried too, they were unformatted at the time.

This sounds like you didn't short the pins correctly or at all. I had to use quite a few screwdrivers to find one that would carry a charge. Nickel plated didn't seem to work. If you short the pins correctly then you will see the IDE devices start to list past the RAM check. I held the short until I saw the IDE devices.

I connected the sata cdrom to the backplane, top slot. Didn't seem to matter, but I had no other disks attached.

I partitioned with one primary MBR partition and formatted with FAT32. No restore of the original files are needed, just the correct partition and format.

Best of luck!

I've got a HP EX 475 that I tried to run Linux on. Unfortunately I did not make a DD image of the SMI USB drive and trying to revert to WHS I'm stuck with a "bootmgr missing" when the pin-clip server restore procedure tries to boot off the USB drive.

Any hope of sharing your DD image? Or does anyone know how to restore the SMI USB drive to it's original contents?

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HP MediaSmart EX475 updated with 2GB ram and AMD BE-2300 dual-core CPU, running WHS 1.
Custom server with Intel Core2 Quad, 8 GB ram running WHS 2011.
http://blog.codewrench.net/

Hello, !
Iam in the same situation. Where i can donwload the original image of the ex475 SMI USB. I only need BOOT.WIM file

Anybody can help me?

Thanks in advance.

I tried this today. However, the USB SMI did not show in Hirens anywhere. I loaded Ubuntu 12.04-1 onto the system and it actually shows the USB SMI there. The files look intact but I think it is an /ext4 partition. Any suggestions as to how i can get this to format FAT 16 ?

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HP MediaSmart Server EX470. 2Gb Ram, AMD64 bit processor (running 32bit). 350Gb Hitachi HDD. Running Linux Ubuntu v10.04, Adobe Flash Server v3.2.2, MySql v5.0, PHP v5.0, Apache v2.2 and Flashchat v4.5.6.

SteffJay,
I went through this last fall. If I am not mistaken, you don't need the SMI file if you don't use WHSv1 anymore. If you have not stumbled over it yet, I wrote a guide to cure the SMI USB, read part 2. Hope it helps.

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HP-ProLiant N40L 8GB WHS2011
HP-EX470 4GB Athlon-X2-BE-2350-(Stepping G1) Windows 8 (server build)

Hello VieuxJules, thanks for your reply. I shall have a look and see what can be done. Thanks again.

_________________
HP MediaSmart Server EX470. 2Gb Ram, AMD64 bit processor (running 32bit). 350Gb Hitachi HDD. Running Linux Ubuntu v10.04, Adobe Flash Server v3.2.2, MySql v5.0, PHP v5.0, Apache v2.2 and Flashchat v4.5.6.

What OS was you using to see the USB SMI ?

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HP MediaSmart Server EX470. 2Gb Ram, AMD64 bit processor (running 32bit). 350Gb Hitachi HDD. Running Linux Ubuntu v10.04, Adobe Flash Server v3.2.2, MySql v5.0, PHP v5.0, Apache v2.2 and Flashchat v4.5.6.

I was using Windows Server 2012 Essentials.

But take note that I had to install it from a USB flash disk to a 250GB disk, while shorting (at each restart of the installation process) the SMI data pins with a little piece of wire, freaky!

Any Windows OS that supports DISKPART should work . Nevertheless, if you have a system disk with WHSv1 already installed, than you can use it (if my memory serves me well, WHS has the DISKPART command). If not, you'll have to install a Win OS from a flash disk (except WHSv1 which must be installed remotely, which we can't without the SMI files). I've personnaly installed with success: Vista, Windows 8, WHS 2011, Windows Server 2012 Essentials, on the EX470. Oh, and my MediaSmart has a dual core processor, and 2GB Ram (at that time...)

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HP-ProLiant N40L 8GB WHS2011
HP-EX470 4GB Athlon-X2-BE-2350-(Stepping G1) Windows 8 (server build)