HP 8200 Elite Small Form Factor randomly hangs during restart

[djanuary]

Matt, Approximately how many systems do you have that are affected? In our environment we have a large number of systems however, we have not been able to confirm it is on them all. We just know that it is on the majority of the ones we have had our hands on for a test group I would say roughly a min of 70% but hard to tell as users are quitting reporting the problem though we did get a report yesterday that 40 systems in one of our training rooms are all having the problem as well.

[PT1]

Disable AMT and update the BIOS.

You may need to update or downgrade your BIOS to 2.09 or 2.23 to see the AMT Option - as version 2.15 has a glitch that might hide the "AMT" option

Been running some machine for 6 weeks, and a bunch more for a month with no issues.

running Win XP SP3 - check your system event logs - i was seeing  "MEI reset errors" that correlate with the next reboot hanging.

[djanuary]

PT1,

That is exactly what we are doing. We are working with HP 3ls at this time and are doing multiple shutdowns.

Have you tried it with the new bios and re-enabling AMT? because if people are paying for vPRO functionality and AMT then it needs to work. If it isn't working then I would suggest opening a case with HP and refrenceing this forum.

Thanks for the info.

[djanuary]

so Far in further testing with a machine that has been reliably broken we have updated to the new 2.21 BIOS and disabled AMT. The system shutdown correctly for several shutdowns. We re-enabled AMT and it failed again. We have now updated the AMD firmware and it shutdown with AMT enabled. I will be doing more shutdowns to see if this machines new found ability to shutdown stays or not. here is the link to the firmware for the 8200 Elite Small Form Factor.

ME Firmware download for 7.1.20.1119

http://h20000.www2.hp.com/bizsupport/TechSupport/SoftwareDescription.jsp?lang=en&cc=us&prodTypeId=12...

[djanuary]

So far further testing with the updated BIOS and updating the firmware is  providing positive results.

That being said we have ran into some new issues.

1) After flashing the BIOS to ver 2.21 we have discovered that several of the systems are losing the ability to boot from USB. Additionally on some systems after reflashing several times the USB boot option will return though on some systems it has not yet.

Has anyone checked to see if their systems with the 2.21 BIOS can still boot from USB? If this is a problem with the 2.21 BIOS then as USB boot is critical to our processes we will not be able to deploy the 2.21 BIOS to our systems which in turn removes our ability to resolve the shutdown issue.

2) Because it is required to go into the BIOS and reset it to Factory Defaults before the BIOS really takes affect (according to HP) it makes deploying the BIOS update on a large scale difficult at best. So in talking with HP they have a biosconfigutility.exe which allows you to export the BIOS settings to a text and then you can edit the text and deploy that to a large number of machine to mass configure the BIOS. This should work.

That being said we have also discovered that this utility will only allow editing down one level within the BIOS. For example in changing the boot order you can put Harddrive above network but you cannot put SATA0 above USB as this is another level down.

This would not normally be an issue except that within my organizations deployment processes Data is written from USB drive to the Hard drive then the system is restarted and boots from the Hard drive to continue the build. So if the USB drive is left pluged in the system will loop.

What we wanted to acomplish is to load the build files from USB then config the BIOS to set SATA0 before USB so that it would continue instead of looping.

Has anyone had this issue or been able to resolve it?

[GBTechSM]

Has anyone found any solutions concerning this problem?

Its a bit frustrating that tech. supports suggests flashing bios to resolve some problems and flashing the BIOS with the most current update creates even more problems. Now I have a production PC who takes easily 20 minutes to reboot.

[AxshunJaxun]

@GBTechSM

I'm sorry you're running into this issue.

Have you run a hard drive test? F2 at power on. Let me know the results from that please.

Do you have this PC on any type of automatic restart via the scheduler?

[GBTechSM]

Thank you for the quick reply. i'm pretty sure this has nothing to do with the hard drive considering everything worked fine just before the BIOS update. I will still run that test to rule out that possibility.

Also, the pc isn't configured for automatic reboots or power on.

thank you for your time.

Will

[AxshunJaxun]

Did you have a separate issue before flashing the BIOS (as the tech suggested)? Have you tried going to the  previous BIOS to eliminate this slow booting issue?

[GBTechSM]

Yes, originally I had a problem with booting the machine with USB storage devices plugged in. The boot process would freeze the machine as soon as a USB thumb drive would be plugged in.

The tech support suggested I flashed my BIOS from 2.06 to 2.21

Flashing the BIOS to 2.21 did not correct the USB/boot problem and caused the new "reboot problem"

I did as suggested and ran the self-tests. I got an "error-code" 0 , no error present everything is working fine as I was expecting.