Source for documentation on circa 2000 HP hardware?

Question

A previous employer has asked me to come by and see if I can resurrect a computer which has failed since I left -- 8 years ago.

The computer in question is a HP 9000 rp2430, HP part A6889A (A Class rackmount).

However, I cannot find hardware documentation on this unit on the HP site, nor on docs.hp.com -- and my Google-fu is weak, since I can't find anything through there either.

Does anyone have a link to documentation on such an old beast?

I'm hoping HP has a site like Sun's site (http://sunsolve.sun.com/handbook_pub/validateUser.do?target=Systems/index) which lists current and EOL systems, along with links to whatever documentation was last available for them.

Answer 1

HP's archive of no longer supported hardware: http://docs.hp.com/en/archive.html

In my case, the A-Class documentation is here: http://docs.hp.com/en/archive.html#A-Class%20Server

...I knew that asking the question would mean I'd find the answer on my own five minutes later.

Answer 2

Is that document (rp24xx_customer.pdf) what you're looking for?

Answer 3

You should check HP Product Bulletin for current and obsoloted products.

Answer 4

the source for informations on HP9000 series, other than what HP tells you, is OpenPA.

There you go: http://openpa.net/systems/hp_a400_a500.html

It will be able to run HP-UX (but look for licensing issues, IIRC the o.s. license could not be reselled.

You should also be able to run Linux on that with all the recent bells and whistles. I regularly run and contribute to Gentoo Linux on PA-RISC, which you can even use to get light virtualization using linux-vserver. I run two C3600 and a J6750 with linux-2.6.3x and recent apache, postfix, spamassassin, mysql, etc... so they sure work :)

EDIT: feel free to contact me if you need further help in resurrecting that thing, I'll try to do what I can.