Might have fixed this myself - looks like a bad block of ports. after upgrading firmware, still had same issue with the three. Factory reset and started from sckratch as the configure was minimal.
Connected all 6 NJ2000 into ports 1-6. They would get PoE, and boot but no lights on the 1920 and you could not ping their management ports. Moved any one of them to ports 9-24 and they worked fine, PoE on nj2000, lights on switch, and can ping their management interfaces. Clients plugged into the NJ2000 we seen on network. Orginally the 3 bad NJ2000 were plugged into ports 1,3,5 and the others were in ports 9, 11, 13.
Submitted a warrenty replacement. First time I had an issue with a whole block of ports on an HP Switch.