PE1550 with Perc 3/DC - RH4 install probs

[Tom Brown]

Faris Raouf wrote:
> 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.
>
>   


guessing but i'd say make sure all bios's and firmwares are upto date - 
seen something similar before and a firmware update on the PERC sorted it.