Trouble Installing 12.04 on Dell PowerEdge R710

[Nizpiz]

I am attempting to install 12.04 64 on a Dell PowerEdge R710 with the goal of configuring a network traffic analyzer. The server has the SAS6IR RAID controller with four 146G SAS drives. The controller only supports RAID 0 and 1, so I configured the four drives as two RAID 1 Virtual Disks.

I downloaded the server .ISO and burned it to a DVD. The first time I installed it, I used guided partitioning with LVM. Everything seemed to install properly, but after the reboot and a brief flash of GRUB, the screen went blank. I left it there for a few hours while I was off doing other things, but it remained in that state so I power-cycled the server by holding the power button. When it finished booting again, I was presented with GRUB and selected the 12.04 installation to boot; however, it did not boot and instead spammed the screen with errors. I can't recall the specific errors just now, but they were something like 'wrong page' and 'unknown partition'.

At first I thought maybe the firmware was too old, so I downloaded the Dell SUU .ISOs and upgraded to the latest. This dod not work. Next, I thought it might be the DVD, so I ran the integrity check after booting from the DVD. The DVD is fine though. Then I thought maybe it was the automagic partitioning, so I set up the partitions manually using only one RAID 1 Disk as using the first 300M for boot using EXT4, and the rest for LVM. In LVM I made a single group with three volumes; 2G swap, 30G root as EXT4, and the rest home as EXT4. This still had the same results as above; one reboot hangs with no putput for several hours, then another reboot gives the above errors.

Right now, I think it may be LVM, so I am reinstalling once more and plan to manually partition without LVM. At the same time, I am downloading 10.04.3.

If anyone has any pointers, I'd greatly appreciate some assistance.

[dochong]

1,
Type on keyboard: exit, the system should boot in.

2,
sudo vim /etc/default/grub
GRUB_CMDLINE_LINUX_DEFAULT="quiet splash"
GRUB_CMDLINE_LINUX="rootdelay=60"

3,
sudo update-grub

4,
Reboot, wait at least 60s after grub boot, and then system boot on automatically.

[dochong]

Do not forget this:
After change /etc/default/grub, must run:
sudo update-grub

[Nizpiz]

This did not work initially, but then I changed rootdelay to 90 and it worked after that.

Thanks!

[me01273]

I had the same problem and I had to use rootdelay=90 as well, although I didn't use "quiet splash" as I didn't see the point of this on a production server and thought it more important to be able to see boot information.