# Dell 6850 Quad 3.66Ghz perc 4 Raid 3x146GB SCSI 320

## benand2020

Hello, 

I have been running into a bit of a snag with this system.  

Dell 6850 

Quad Xeon 3.66Ghz

Perc 4 Raid

3x146GB HDD

8 GB Ram

ATI Onboard Video

I have been trying to boot from a CentOS installation CD and I am having one heck of an issue trying to get the OS loaded on this machine.  However XP can boot just fine.  But with this kind of horse power I am going to want/need Linux on it.

The issue is that I cannot get passed the "No Bootable Device" "Press F1 to Retry or F2 to enter setup"

Right now I have seen other items on the global cloud that state "So Far I have only been able to load Suse or RedHat Ent" 

Since I do not have the cash for RHEL ENT and I do not want Novel on the system I am at odds end to get this up and running with CentOS 5.4 but I am afraid that if I cannot get CentOS to work I am probably going to have the same issue with Gentoo.

Does anyone have any suggestions for how to get the system to boot the kernel?  :Sad: 

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## cach0rr0

are you getting this trying to run the CentOS install CD, or trying to boot CentOS from disk after it's installed? 

(and where does gentoo come into the equation here?)

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## benand2020

Right now the issue is where the Server boots up and then tries to load the boot loader. 

The server does not even launch the installation.  It goes right into the "Press F1 to retry boot or F2 to open settings" "Non Bootable Disk" 

The best part is I just got done installing the same OS on the IBM X345s.  

Since it is the boot loader having the issue I am sure I am going to have the same issue with the Gentoo installation.  I might have to use PXE in order to get the server up and running.  For some reason it does not like the boot loader.  

This is the first and only machine where I have had this kind of an issue.

I am going to try Gentoo tonight and I will post the results, but at this time things are looking grim.

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## jba

I'd be very surprised if you had problems with gentoo - i've run gentoo a bunch of those same boxes w/o issues. I'm frankly surprised you had issues with centos too. How are you booting the system? CD? Maybe the cd drive is fracked - try a USB stick.

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## benand2020

OK...... 

Now this is getting really perplexing.  Gentoo Work just fine no questions asked using the minimal install CD thank you Gentoo! 

But the even deeper question is.... Why did some of the other distros that I tried not work?

1. Could it be that the bios does not like DVD's?

2. Could it be that I have more than one bad DVD Drive? 

3. Or am I just clinically insane? 

Some of you are probably about ready to say option three since I am going to try and find out why the boot loader is misfiring on CentOS and some of the other distros.

and "JBA" I do like the idea of installing for a USB stick and I might have to resort to that medium if the boot loader is unable to behave correctly.

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## jba

Benand - i do most of my installs (where i don't have a pxeboot server) via usb stick - there's an awesome app in the portage tree called 'unetbootin' that will auto-build you a bootable USB stick for almost any distribution. 

I can't tell you why it didn't like the DVD's, I almost have to think that something was wrong with the other DVD/CD burns. Very odd either way.

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## cach0rr0

unetbootin used to be very nice, recently it's been broken - dont know if it was ever fixed, but i am one of many who repeatedly had it creating non-booting USB drives. 

before, when it worked, it was a flawless tool. in fact the Windows revision of Unetbootin doesn't have the problem I don't think. 

but for now i use the manual method from the LiveUSB page for creating my bootable thumb drive (usually of systemrescuecd)

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## jba

Hey cach0rr0, i've been using sys-boot/unetbootin-372 for a few weeks, creating a slew of usb sticks (gentoo, centos, crunchbang, among others) and haven't had a single non-functioning usb stick. Maybe it's been fixed recently?

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## cach0rr0

 *jba wrote:*   

> Hey cach0rr0, i've been using sys-boot/unetbootin-372 for a few weeks, creating a slew of usb sticks (gentoo, centos, crunchbang, among others) and haven't had a single non-functioning usb stick. Maybe it's been fixed recently?

 

possibly. hope so! 

I figured it would be at some point, just waiting for someone to confirm - I've been busy job hunting so not had a chance to do my regular prerequisite searching before posting. 

Thanks for that, I may try again just for grins! I think it had something to do with mtools? Dunno

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