I pulled a couple of ML350's out of storage for a training lab, and to my chagrin only one boots. When I plug the good ML350 in, the NIC light flickers green briefly and it powers up normally. When I plug the bad ML350 in, the NIC light does not flicker at all. Instead both the rear and front UID lights turn solid blue. Pressing the UID and/or power button does not change this. The fans do not spin up and there is no video.
My initial thought was that the PSU was bad, so I swapped PSUs (bad to good and good to bad) and outlets on my power strip (just in case I had a bad outlet). This did not change things either. The issue did not follow the PSU, so I can rule out a bad PSU. I then pulled the motherboard tray out of the bad server, reseated all my cables, and looked for any glaring issues on the power distribution board under the mobo tray (eg, bulging capacitors or cracked components). I saw nothing out of the ordinary.
My final step was to remove the ram, raid array, and dvd drive. No change.
In the searching I've done on SF I see mentions of some ProLiant models having a system health LED on the motherboard. I do not see any lights on the motherboard at all.
I am not able to connect to iLO. I've never done it before so it is possible I'm doing it wrong, but I know the DNS name and followed these steps.
Anyone see anything I'm missing? Does anyone know a way I can narrow this down further to determine if its the motherboard, PD board, or something else that has gone bad and needs to be replaced? The machine is out of warranty, and I'm not sure my boss will want to throw a bunch of money at it.
Best Answer
So I finally found some documentation on HPs website that helped me narrow the issue to the Power Distribution board.
Apparently there are 12 LEDs on the motherboard. None of them light up. http://h20564.www2.hpe.com/hpsc/doc/public/display?docId=emr_na-c01726637#N102BA
And this page tells the minimum hardware configuration: http://h20564.www2.hpe.com/hpsc/doc/public/display?docId=emr_na-c03212774
With that information I can now confidently say that it needs a new PD board.