HP Designjet 5500 - Failed hard drive???

[EricaA]

My Designjet 5500 plotter has the following error message:  "Boot failed.  Error: 1f50007.  Hard disk failure."  I took out the hard drive.  I then took a good hard drive out of another Designjet 5500 plotter that I have here (it has other issues, but the hard drive is healthy) and installed it in the 1st plotter.  It repeated the same error message (i.e., "Boot failed.  Error: 1f50007.  Hard disk failure."    I took that hard drive back out and put it back in 2nd plotter and it still boots fine.

To me, this means that probably the hard drive isn't actually the problem with my 1st plotter because I put a perfectly good hard drive in and it still says the hard drive is failed.  It seems that something else failed that is now telling the plotter it has a failed hard drive when that isn't the real problem.  Has anyone else experience this?  Any pointers for me on what to look for or what my next step of troubleshooting would be?  Nothing covered in the manual about failed hard drive errors.  Only  how to remove and install one. 

Thanks.  Erica

[D Hook · Accepted solution]

Unplug the printer.  Loosens the screws and remove the plug in print server on the back of the printer (it just pulls straight out), then take the long back cover off.  Look for two lights, one amber and one green on the circuit board on the left.  Lights will be on the upper left area of the board (main PCA).  If you don't have both lights then it's most likely the power supply board (the circuit board to the right of the hard drive) has failed.  My experience has been that when the power supply board fails, the error you see is the hard drive fails to boot.

If you've already tried a known good hard drive and have the same failure, that's most likely the problem.

Let us know what you find.

[EricaA]

Thanks very much!!  That was it!  I tested it like you said and I had the amber light only and the green lightcame on once and then went off.  

I cleaned the power supply board (blew it off with compressed air as there was heavy dust on it).  An associate of mine inspected all the capacitors and they were all fine.  We then inspected the resistors and checked voltage on a few things and after that we tested it again and both lights came on strong and the HDD power cable had the right voltages.  Not sure what the exact problem was but it was something with the power supply board and it is now resolved fully!  Now it boots up correctly and works great again!  Thank you.

[D Hook]

Glad you got it to work.

Sometimes those power supplies can be intermittent.  Mine would show the same error you had, then I'd shut it off and turn it back on and it would work.  Then if finally quit all together.  You might want to start looking for a new power supply, just to have it ready.  You can look on ebay for them but try to buy a new one.  The used ones usually have a pretty short life span, since you don't know how old it is when you buy it.  I paid $250 for a new one.

[EricaA]

Okay, great.  I will keep this in mind.  I was looking for a power supply today on Ebay before I got it to work.  Thanks for the tip on the used ones being unpredictable on lifespan.