PE1550 with Perc 3/DC - RH4 install probs

[Faris Raouf]

We've recently pulled a PE1550 from frontline duty. It has lasted amazingly
well considering it has been in constant service since 2000 or 2001, moved
between at least 3 datacentres and survived two power spikes. 

I have it here in the office now and I wanted to do something useful with
it. I figured I may as well install Centos/RedHat 4 on it, then try to get
Vmware Server running (or alternatively install ESXi on it).

It has a Perc 3/DC card with 3x 36Gb 15k drives configured as RAID5.

Unfortunately it won't play ball. ESXi says it can't write to the hard disk
and crashes on install.

The Centos 4 installer sees the logical volume and lets me partition it, but
then immediately bombs out saying it can't write to disk and I probably
don't have any free disk space. 

I'm hoping someone has had similar problems and knows exactly what to do ;-)

I've done the Google thing but I'm none the wiser for it. Matt's page comes
up a lot but I can't quite figure out if there's anything helpful there or
not, as it seems to imply that RH4 supports most things out of the box with
no hassles.

I've tried formatting each drive, initialising the logical drive again and
again....I don't think there's a hardware fault. It passes its diagnostics
with flying colours.

Faris.