DellPowerEdgeSC420

Hardware specification

  • Processor: Intel Pentium 4 2.8 GHz with Hyperthreading (SMT)
  • RAM: 3GB
  • SCSI controller: N/A
  • Hardware RAID card:
  • Hard Drive Disks: 2 x SATA 80GB
  • NIC controller: onboard Broadcom

Ubuntu Server Edition and Ubuntu Desktop Edition Installation and Current Issues

  • Ubuntu 6.06 LTS Server Edition cannot be installed. After booting the CD and selecting "Install to the hard disk" or "Install a LAMP server", the install screen would flicker and float around making it impossible to read.
  • Ubuntu 7.04 Server Edition cannot be installed. After booting the CD and selecting "Install to the hard disk", the install screen would flicker and float around making it impossible to read.
  • Ubuntu 6.06 LTS Desktop Edition cannot be installed. After booting from the CD the screen begins to flicker similarly to the Server Editions.
  • Ubuntu 7.04 Desktop Edition installs successfully and seems to work fine. The only issue I found so far is that the CERC SATA 2S RAID controller does not work correctly in Ubuntu 7.04. In the CERC SATA 2S RAID controller BIOS I setup a RAID 1 mirrored array of drives which I previously used in Windows 2003 Small Business Server. I never formated the drives after using Windows 2003 so I expected that they would get formated and overwritten by the Ubuntu installation process. Both drives were detected and displayed in step 4 of 7 of the install process but I could only use them as stand alone drives, despite that they were mirrored in the BIOS. After Ubuntu was installed, one of the mirrored drives had Ubuntu installed on it and the other still had Windows 2003 installed on it. This makes me think that the CERC SATA 2S RAID controller is primarily a software based RAID solution. Without an Ubuntu driver that can handle software RAID for this controller you will probably only be able to use standalone drives.

Hardware details

ServerTestingTeam/DellPowerEdgeSC420 (last edited 2008-08-06 16:15:56 by localhost)