HP DL360 G7 Red Screen of Death Illegal OpCode

by sircles on Feb 10, 2017 in Hardware, Windows Server, Microsoft Windows, Troubleshooting
This is a fairly disturbing occurrence - when your server, instead of booting-up, just after one rec

HP DL360 G7 Red Screen of Death Illegal OpCode

 

This is a fairly disturbing occurrence - when your server, instead of booting-up, just after one recommended update or a first time reboot after install, you receive a bright red screen explaining that the server feels it has done enough and will proceed no further. Not great news if you have a lot of users awaiting emails or database results, and even worse if you've never seen it before.

 

 

Well this error can be related to a few problems concerning running some forms of Linux on SD card drives, but it can also affect those of us just running plain old Windows Server on the inbuilt 410i RAID controller.

In essence the message means that it is unable to read the boot device and so has thrown an HP level issue instead of a standard Windows BSOD or BIOS error.

I have found this problem in connection with the following:

  • Installing using iLO3 with a network accessed ISO file and then rebooting for the first time
  • Installing a recommended update to the NICs that made the whole server BSOD and then reboot into this and so we had to fix the error to find out that the DB was intact
  • Updating BIOS for the motherboard that has somehow disabled the USB boot in the BIOS and so lost the SD card boot device (which I was using on that occassion)
  • Installed the Windows iLO3 drivers which then somehow told Windows, because there was an ISO listed in the ILO3 boot-up system, that Windows was not the boot device

In order to fix these issues you should:

  1. Update the iLO3 firmware as there is a fix in the latest versions (allegedly) but I have found this unreliable
  2. Disable the iLO if this fails at boot-up
  3. Change the boot order in BIOS so that your boot device is first and then:
  4. Boot from a Windows DVD and ensure you can see the boot volume and then use the inbuilt repair (this seems to be the best solution for Windows installs) This is what has solved the issue for me time and time again.
  5. Remove any ISO path from the iLO install feature to ensure it is not somehow still checking for it. This is often the problem if you are not booting from an exotic device such as an SD card.

If all the above fails you can just try unplugging all the PSUs for ten minutes as this is a recommended solution from HP, but they recommend only for the G8 servers. 

Good luck with a really distressing and fairly futile error screen.

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