[moxy]

Ok, in an attempt to get something (anything) up and running, I attempted the same things I had been with FreeNAS with Openfiler. This is part of the discussion I've been having on the Openfiler forum:

I'm not sure how you might do PXE, so I can't help you there.

If you are not afraid to crack the case (warranty/support disclaimer), you might try replacing the hard disks with one or more spare blanks to see how it behaves, or just removing them and seeing what the behavior is. Knowing what the guts are made from (generic hardware is everywhere) may also help. Try a USB floppy disk and bootable DOS floppy (look for a FreeDOS image on the net, or hijack a Win95/98 CD boot process and make yourself a bootable DOS 7 floppy - I also have VM Images of DOS 6.22 I make them from, but not everyone else does). Also, read into the appliance's recovery process to see how they do it - it may reveal some secrets you can take advantage of.

I had luck on a McAfee security appliance. It was a re-badged Dell PE750 with a CD drive that would not boot for me, and a BIOS I could not get into with standard key presses. With a HD swap, I got it to boot under my control (prepared the HD on another system) and I then re-flashed the BIOS as a Dell PE750 server. The rest was easy from there as I could control the BIOS. CPU upgrade (3Ghz HT) and added RAM, 2x 500GB SATA drives, and I had a nice iSCSI target unit (had to re-purpose it soon after for other duties, unfortunately).

I just installed OF to a Bluecoat appliance box (P3 Celeron, I swapped for a P3-933, a FW/Gateway accelerator appliance), which has a flash boot module slot as a Master/IDE0. To take it over, I put an IDE DVD drive by itself on the an IDE channel (no other drives) and was able to get it to boot from a CD with Caldera DOS on it. I then put the flash drive back online, with a 256MB blank module. I partitioned and formatted it with FAT there (did not make it bootable), shut down, moved the module to my laptop, copied the S2425 Tyan BIOS utility and BIOS code to it via PC card adapter, brought it back, booted it up from CD, changed to the 'HD' which was the flash drive, and flashed the BIOS back to PC compatible. From there, the box was mine. I inserted a pair of 320GB IDE drives from a failed dual-drive USB enclosure (USB electronics died), made them RAID1 for /, plus a little swap on each (64M), and I put /boot and /var/log on the flash drive. Found a gig NIC card and an L riser adapter, and I'm about to put it online as an iSCSI unit for Backup-To-Disk use off a Win box (reason for that is another story).

I also took over a pair of Iomega i40x units after replacing the drive elements. They were also a challenge to select booting up from, too, up until I plugged an Adaptec 2940 SCSI card (w/SCSI CD and bootable CD) into a PCI slot. I programmed the SCSI adapter to boot from the CD's SCSI address, and with any bootable CD, it was all mine.

More than one way to attack the problem, but all you generally need is to wedge something into the boot process. Sometimes you will need to kill off the appliance BIOS. Be advised you may not be able to get it back, so proceed accordingly.

To that I replied:

I'm definitely not afraid to crack the case. When I bought the unit, it didn't have drives in the sleds. I installed the four 750 gig drives I had bought for another unit I couldn't get to work into this one. That being said, I know for certain that all four drives are wiped clean. I read through the manual for the unit, but they word everything as if it comes with an OS already installed and the "administrator" that purchases it simply configures it. There are no recovery steps in the manual pertaining to what one would do if a RAID failed (2 or more of the drives crapping out which would mean starting from square one). The best troubleshooting and/or recovery steps it lists have to do with their proprietary application failing... nothing catastrophic. If your RAID were to fail, it's assumed you would send the unit back to the manufacturer and let them deal with it. There are no spare IDE connectors or floppy ribbon connectors on the motherboard, and it apparently won't boot from USB, so it's as if there's no other option than to send it back.

Just for "fun" I removed one of the drives from one sled, inserted the sled back into the chassis and then pulled the ribbon and power cables out the top of the casing. To them I connected an internal CD-ROM drive from my desktop PC. It wouldn't boot from it until I enabled PXE boot in the BIOS. Why on earth it thinks an internal CD-ROM is PXE is beyond me. It booted from the OF CD and got me to the graphical installer. I chose to let it set up the drives however it wanted to (despite the fact that the fourth drive was still physically sitting on the desk at this point), but halfway through setting up the formatting, the machine randomly rebooted. This has turned into a trend. No matter what I do while that internal CD-ROM is in it will "randomly" reboot about 5 minutes after POST. Thoughts?