I was given 4 servers from my company recently. All dell poweredge servers. I am trying to set up my r620…
Firstly I did not want to use RAID at all so I flashed the RAID controller. I flashed it using this guide: https://fohdeesha.com/docs/perc.html and it went fine.
Something I noticed though is that, raid has to be enabled in the BIOS still, even tho we flashed the controller to allow IT mode. If I disable RAID from the BIOS, my live installer doesn’t see any of my HDD’s. So I left it enabled, but I don’t have any RAID configs setup (cleared them from the menu from pressing ctrl+R during boot)
So I try to install my OS (booting from usb) and i remove all the drives from the bays except one.
The OS seems to install perfectly fine. I get zero issues. The imagine below is what happens when I try to boot after installing the OS. I have tried VOID Linux and Debian. Both do the same thing. I am booting in UEFI mode. Please help, any support is appreciated.
I tried 3 different hard drives…
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I’m pretty sure your raid controller flashing went wrong because I’ve gone through the same flashing process on my r620 and I don’t even have a RAID option in my BIOS anymore.
During boot do you get a print out of all the detected hard drives that looks like this?
I mean…is it even necessary to flash the RAID controller? Is using RAID 0 on each drive separately any different…I should mention I do plan to experiemnt w/ ZFS (which is why i want raid disabled cause zfs has raidz built in)
PLEASE do not just do a RAID 0 on each drive. Bad bad bad bad. You’d be better suited to just doing hardware RAID in that case.
Did you follow the last optional step on Fodeesha’s guide? You need to install the boot loader in order to boot off of any of the drives connected to the flashed PERC. Although if you’re still seeing RAID options your flash may have not worked. Are you still able to get into the PERC configuration page that allows you to create and destroy arrays?
HOLY SHIT THANK YOU LOL I did indeed skip that step cause it was prefixed with “optional” I didnt even read it.
Server is installed and booting fine now ! :P
Did you select the correct boot drive(s) in the HBA BIOS?
when i tried doing an install, i took out all the drives except one (the on the OS was going to be insatlled on to). In the pic you can see it pulls the name of the os, but its like it cant boot it for some reason.
That didn’t answer my question. 🙂
I think you will have to set up the disks in the RAID even if they are set them up as RAID 0.
I set up my r610 over the weekend and I have one SSD and 5 HDD I set up the 5 in a RAID and forgot to set up the SSD for the OS, when installing the OS i could see the HDD but not the SSD. I had to reboot and initialize that SSD as a disk in RAID 0 and I was back in business. I flashed the PERC when I started but the drives were still not active till RAID was set
Your flash did not work correctly if you are still able to see anything related to RAID options when interacting with the card. Flashing it into HBA mode takes all of that away and requires a bootloader to be installed in order for a connected drive to be bootable.