john.parnefjord.se Reflections & findings

This information is perhaps outdated with the advent of Debian Etch but I see that quite a lot of people have tried to find this information on the site. The info was lost during a move to another CMS, but here it is again. 

If you reached this post you have probably faced the same problem as I did; trying to install Debian ADM64 Sarge on a Dell PowerEdge 1850/2850 using the images from www.debian.org. Unfortunately this release is based on the 2.6.8 kernel, and as far as I know there are no drivers for the PERC4 raid controllers included.

I tried some different workarounds, with some earlier releases using the 2.6.10 kernel, without success though. But Ronan Mullally pointed me to a release based on 2.6.12. It’s made by Len Sorensen and can be fetched from http://tinyplanet.ca/~lsorense/amd64/. This proved useful, no problem at all installing.

When booting the disk enter expert at the prompt. Enter information as needed. When reaching the hardware detection remove the megaraid module from the list. Just before performing disk detection press ALT-F2 to switch to the second console. Enter the following line:

modprobe megaraid_mbox

Switch back to console one, ALT-F1 , and continue as normal. Debian AMD64 Sarge works like a charm on the 1850:s and 2850:s.

According to Vince Hillier the same ISO works just fine with 6850 as well.