Linux freezes while booting on Poweredge server

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PootsMaster

PootsMaster

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Apr 24, 2016
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I tried to install CentOS on my old Dell Poweredge SC440 server, but it would always freeze on the booting screen with the rotating white circle thingy. I even went to give other distros like Ubuntu and mint a shot, but they also have the same bizarre problem. The hardware is in good condition, ran Windows XP without problems for quite a while. Anyone have any idea whats going on? Thanks in advance!
 
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M
Just as a test, you could try booting something like the Gentoo minimal installation image (from here) which is a super-barebones liveCD.

If you don't get a satisfactory display of kernel messages during boot, you can try typing 'gentoo-nofb' at the boot prompt (rather than just pressing enter) to make the kernel stick to good old-fashioned text mode.

Assuming it boots, you can then run things like 'dmesg | less' to review the boot messages, 'lspci' to list all the PCI devices in the system ('lspci -v | less' will give much more information, including what driver is in use for each device) or 'ls /dev/sd*' to list all hard-disk-related device nodes.

(I don't know how familiar you are with Linux - apologies if I'm teaching you...
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McHenryB

McHenryB

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Jan 31, 2015
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Could be an issue with the disk controller or the integrated NIC. Try turning the NIC off in the BIOS, and check that your Linux install disks support the disk controller.

Servers often come with DVDs to aid OS installation because of the specialised hardware.
 
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molletts

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Jun 16, 2009
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It might be helpful if you can boot the DVD with the splash screen disabled, so that the kernel boot messages are displayed. That might give you some idea what the kernel is doing (or not). (If it doesn't stop with a kernel panic message like "Unknown root device", you should be able to scroll back through the kernel messages with Shift+PgUp to check that it has found the DVD drive, etc.)

I can't imagine that the SC440 has anything that a standard Linux distribution can't handle, though. I would guess it's not that different from my SC1430s which have a normal Intel IDE controller for the DVD (ata_piix driver), Intel legacy-mode-only onboard SATA (also ata_piix), LSI Logic SAS (mptsas) or LSI MegaRAID (megaraid_sas) and a Broadcom onboard NIC (tg3).
 
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PootsMaster

PootsMaster

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Apr 24, 2016
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Tried turning NIC off but it doesn't seem to do anything.
I managed to get what seems like the DVD I need, but it does not boot up, spewing lines of "unknown keyword in config file" and ends with "could not find Kerbal image : Linux". I hope its just a bad disk.
 
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M

molletts

Distinguished
Jun 16, 2009
475
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19,165
Just as a test, you could try booting something like the Gentoo minimal installation image (from here) which is a super-barebones liveCD.

If you don't get a satisfactory display of kernel messages during boot, you can try typing 'gentoo-nofb' at the boot prompt (rather than just pressing enter) to make the kernel stick to good old-fashioned text mode.

Assuming it boots, you can then run things like 'dmesg | less' to review the boot messages, 'lspci' to list all the PCI devices in the system ('lspci -v | less' will give much more information, including what driver is in use for each device) or 'ls /dev/sd*' to list all hard-disk-related device nodes.

(I don't know how familiar you are with Linux - apologies if I'm teaching you to suck eggs! Actually setting up and starting to use Gentoo has a learning curve like the north face of Everest even if you're experienced with other distros so you may want to stick to something less "hardcore".)
 
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PootsMaster

PootsMaster

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Apr 24, 2016
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Linux is pretty new to me, but I will give that a shot!
 
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