It's taken me about eight hours on two occasions to fix an issue with my ML110 G9 home server.
Power up, go through POST, hand over to boot devices and... nothing.
Google's full of helpful suggestions like flash bios, flash ILO, poke this, squeeze that, shake another thing. None of that worked. (Actually getting the firmware from behind HP's paywall took me far too long to figure out and I'll never forgive them for doing that)
I actually fixed it by accident three weeks ago, but didn't know how. Anyway, new kernel means a reboot, so I held my breath tonight and did so - and it didn't return.
Firing up ILO's remote console = same thing again. Hung on "Loading system drivers..."
Anyway, this time - after two hours of faff, I actually figured out what was causing the problem.
I won't ask you to guess, you won't.
It was a USB camera I had plugged in as a security feed for the garage.
Cheap old thing I had in one of my boxes-o-crap and was working fine, recording in zoneminder nicely.
But when it's plugged in, the entire server refuses to boot. Unplug it - voila, grub menu.
The accidental fix was when I removed the server and put it on the bench to test. Suddenly it booted. I shoved it back in and walked softly away, as you do - and a few days later, unthinkingly connected the camera again. So it has sat, patiently waiting to cause me another late night of standing in a cold garage with a puzzled frown.
Sometimes I seriously hate computers.
S
