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jasonmichel

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Dell Poweredge 2900 Won't boot into OS

Have a dell PE 2900 that was running ok until today, explorer locked up and wouldn't respond to anything so we had to power cycle it via power button, when it booted back up it just hung, rebooted several times and it still did it, sometimes it would say press F1 to continue or F2 to enter setup..or sometimes it hangs right before, i've went into bios to make sure nothing was turned on and no new hardware showing up.  attached are screens where it hangs
pdserver.JPG
pdserver2.JPG
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wwakefield
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Does your RAID config utility show good health on your drives?
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Darius Ghassem
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jasonmichel

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yes, the raid shows all online and SMART don't show any errors
yeah that was my next question, should i try a repair, wanted to make sure it wasn't hardware related first...ill give it a try
Did you test all hard drives separately? This "hung" indicates serious problem with hardware or file system. Thus you need to narrow the problem to its bottle neck first.
well i put an ubuntu disc in and booted to it, i was able to see the file system was intact
Intact - not corrupt? Only MS CHKDSK can tell if it is intact. Boot from Win2003 CD and get to Recovery Console to scan the file system from there.
Is the LCD panel blue or amber?  F1/F2 indicates a misconfiguration in the BIOS - possibly bad hardware.  Consider running 32-bit diagnostics from Dell's Support Site.
it's blue, and i removed all the hardware that didn't come from dell, i even turned off the internal sata, CD and diskette
Run the repair
Run the repair, I agree, BUT F1/F2 has nothing to do with the OS - you have something else going on.  If the F1/F2 is intermittent, as you seem to have indicated, you have a hardware problem and may be accompanied by a message of some sort.  If you are getting F1/F2 on every boot/reboot, it might be hardware but is more likely a misconfiguration (SATA port on in BIOS with nothing connected to it, etc.).
I take it you were able to repair the OS booting to the CD.  Did you resolve the F1/F2 issue?
I guess I can't see the "verified solution." Well, great.