Linux not reading drives...

[cbruinooge]

I just bought 2 used servers from a local auction. One is a Dell power edge 2950 III, and the other is a Dell Power Edge 2900. I want to turn them both into web servers with CentOS 6.3 on both. The servers both came with hard drives in them and when booted up both went to windows server 2003 login screen. So I know the servers are working correctly. I decided to take out the existing 250 GB Sata drives out of the 2900 and put 4 new 500Gb Sata drives in it. I booted up Centos but when I get to the screen where it checks for drives it says "No usable drives". I can't figure this out for anything. I have tried formatting the drives in NTSF, and ExFAT. neither worked. What am I doing wrong? Any ideas?

 

[Nothing_But_NAS]

Are the drives at least showing up under /dev/sd*? If there are no storage device presented there, do a lspci and check what controller is on the motherboard. There might be a weird controller which is not supported by the default kernel and needs specific modules loaded or even worst, a blob driver.