Help: Linux Installation on PowerEdge T605

[Mohan]

Dear all,
Thanks a ton for all the suggestions and the rapid replies.

Memory Test: T605 passed the test just under 25 hours! (not sure why it took
so long for just 16gigs!) (knocking off problems due to memory)

Partition Table: Formatted and recreated the partition table. Hard drives
seems ok to me. Installation din't proceed. (knocking off errors due to
partition layout and assumming hard drives are ok)

For the last time I wanted to check installation with internal DVD-drive and
today morning I succedded in installating the bare skeleton of openSuSE
(minimal partition layout ( / and /home)) after fiddling in text mode for
long long time (to check I tried once again in the afternoon, but it once
again it spits out the buffer I/O errors and few checksum errors).
Interestingly, after skeleton installation I could mount cd's n dvd's as
usual. Everything seems to work perfectly well except the network.

Borrowed external USB DVD-driver from my system admin(sometimes it's quite
hard to find the syst admins, they seem to have mastered the art of
vanishing quickly in thin air! lol) Booted the machine with my good old
media and it booted perfectly well. No checksum errors, no I/O errors
(Hurray!) and the installation proceeded as nicely as it should. At the end
of installation, openSuSE tries to boot from the installed kernel instead of
rebooting completely with kexec. For some reason it din't work! So manually
rebooted it and it booted perfectly well with minor network problem :-( eth1
waits for the ip forever, even though the server sees its requests and sends
back an ip!

So called up the magic man(sys admin) to check it. He too was intially
confused seeing this! After trying many things, he plugged in the n/w cable
to another port and hurray network started working! So, plugged in the cable
to the older port and it works like magic! I think this might have been the
problem during my network installation errors!

Sorry folks, some of them suggested few other methods which I couldn't
test(meters above my head, i'm just an amateur). Since the DVD-drive seems
to work perfectly well, why couldn't that do it during installation ? Should
I file a bug for the drivers ?

Finally managed to install Linux in my new machine. Happy, happy weekend :-)

Cheers,
Mohan P J
University of Glasgow

PS: Apologies for spamming with such a long email!


On Fri, Jan 9, 2009 at 1:10 AM, Charles H Biel <cbiel at uta.edu> wrote:

> Hi Mohan,
>
>    Another installation idea if you do not have a USB CD/DVD drive but
> do have a DRAC card is to use the virtual media option. I've done remote
> installs using both physical CD media and iso images in my workstation
> that way before with success.
>
> Hope this helps,
> Charles
>
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