I'm trying to install SuSE 8.2 on a Dell PowerEdge 2550 I just got. I'm having problems because of the PE3/Di RAID controller (made by Adaptec) it comes with.
When I boot up off the CD and try a normal (non-manual) install, it reboots itself after popping up the first screen of the install.
It was a bit of a fiddling to get 8.1 onto a 2650 (rack mount) dell box. It would report "No disks found" for lack of drivers.
I gave up on that and tried the manual install. This is where I noticed that the drivers for the RAID controller were not being loaded.. I tried using the second modules floppy (which claims to have the driver I need), but it doesn't let me select the driver to load. It reads the floppy, says "Loading data into ramdisk (3090 kB)", then goes back to the "Kernel modules" menu.
Just going back to Manual Install and loading the aacraid driver got that going for me. Then I could do the install.
With 8.0, I didn't even need to go to manual mode.. The installer just found it.
A bit of searching on the net (yay, google!) led me to http://www.domsch.com/linux/ which (while a little dated) tells me I need the aacraid drivers to use the RAID controller (which I can't seem to select) and that these became part of the kernel in 2.4.17-pre7 (marked experimental). I took a quick look at the k_deflt-2.4.20-39 rpm on my CDs and it looks like, once installed, the driver will be available without much hassle..
But it wouldn't boot off the HD. Kernel panic over not being able to read the root partition.
So I had to boot of the CD again, (non smp kernel) this time loading the network driver too. That let me configure eth0 and get to online update. A newer version of the kernel fixed it for me. I also had to check the parameter INITRD_MODULES from /etc/sysconfig/kernel. Should have at least aacraid and reiserfs. Doesn't hurt to have the network driver too...
I thought this was sorted out by the time 8.2 came out??? 8.2 went on fairly easily for me.
I managed to get 8.0 installed with no problem.. I read on the Dell linux-poweredge list that people are having the same problems with RH9, but going back to older versions worked. Perhaps there is an issue with some of the optimizations used in distros compiled w/ GCC 3.2+? Going to be trying an update to 8.2 today.. My boss told me I could mess around with it for a while with no worries, so I'll tinker and see what happens.. Whenever my copy of 9.0 shows up (ordered it at the end of last week), I'll try that.. -- trey