Encountering difficulties installing Linux on your Dell R620 server, specifically when the installer fails to detect your drives, can be a frustrating experience. If you’re facing this issue, here’s a systematic approach to diagnose and potentially resolve the problem, ensuring a smooth Linux installation on your Dell R620 server.
First, utilize a live environment like Knoppix 9.1 to gain insights. Boot your Dell R620 server with Knoppix and open a terminal. Execute the command fdisk -l. This command will list all drives that the system’s kernel can detect. If fdisk identifies your server’s drives, it indicates that the hardware is likely functional and visible at a basic level.
Next, consider preparing a clean drive for testing. If you have a spare hard drive available, connect it to your Dell R620 server. Within the Knoppix environment, employ the utility GParted. GParted allows you to completely wipe the drive, removing any existing partitions or configurations. Apply these changes in GParted to ensure the drive is in a pristine, unformatted state. Attempt the Linux installation again, targeting this newly cleaned drive. If the installer now recognizes this clean drive, it suggests that the issue might be related to the previous state of your original drives or the installation media itself.
Should the installer still fail to detect even a clean drive, examine the integrity of your installation media. Verify the SHA-256 checksum of your downloaded Rocky Linux 8.6 ISO against the official checksum. A mismatch indicates a corrupted download, necessitating a fresh download of the Linux distribution.
If the ISO is valid, the problem might stem from the Dell R620 server’s hardware or firmware. Issues with the motherboard are rare but possible, especially with older hardware. Furthermore, recent firmware updates, particularly BIOS or RAID controller firmware, could inadvertently introduce incompatibility issues with the operating system. In some cases, downgrading the firmware to a previous version might resolve the drive detection problem.
Another factor to consider, especially with Rocky Linux 8.6 and similar distributions, is the GRUB2 bootloader configuration. Modern Red Hat Enterprise Linux (RHEL) based distributions like Rocky Linux store GRUB2 configuration files in /boot/loader/entries instead of the traditional /boot/grub2. While less likely to cause drive detection issues during installation, this difference is worth noting for boot process understanding later on.
To further isolate the problem, experiment with installing alternative Linux distributions. Try installing Fedora, which shares a similar installer with RHEL, or openSUSE Leap. These experiments help determine if the issue is specific to Rocky Linux 8.6 or a more general compatibility problem with the Dell R620 server hardware.
By systematically performing these steps, you can effectively narrow down whether the root cause of the drive detection problem during Linux installation on your Dell R620 server is hardware-related or software-related, paving the way for a successful resolution and Linux deployment.
