Dell Poweredge 4200 install problems (Solved)

[Warped_Dragon]

I'm having some problems installing gentoo on to my Dell Poweredge 4200. It's an older model, with dual cpu support but only one at the moment, a Pentium2 233. Booting gentoo, I get the following:

Code: Select all

loading gentoo........
loading gentoo.igz.......
Ready.

And then it just sits there mindlessly like my old 286 box. I'm using the 2004.3 livecd. I've tried both kernels (gentoo and gentee-nofb), and ran the memtest, which does work, but with no errors found.

If it got a little further along in it's boot before pulling the old "choke and die" stunt, I'd be far more able to deal with it. But "Ready." isn't really much to go on...

At this point my best guess is a hardware problem, possibly the bios of the mobo, scsi card, or raid card. But I would tend to think it would get a little further along in the boot before crapping out if that were the case. Here's the output as it boots, with some stuff removed cause I can sum it up in far less words):

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POST tests, mem tests, everything A-OK...

Adaptec AIC 7880 Ultra/Ultra W BIOS 1.26s6 Dell06s6

No SCSI boot devices found
No SCSI devices found

Adaptec AIC 7860 Ultra/Ultra W BIOS 1.26s6 Dell06s6

More crap here, it scans the scsi bus (again. I think this is for a different scsi channel? Only reason I can think of for doing it twice, and not detecting anything on the first go-around)  and finds the cd & tape drive, and the scsi host controller. Everything seems in order.

PowerEdge Raid II Adapter BIOS 1.44 Oct 8, 1996
Americian MegaTrends, Inc.

Here it finds the logical drive I set up (I did it in the raid cards config/bios screen. It detected all three drives and they checked out ok. They are set up as one logical drive in a raid 5 configuration), and notices theres a bootable cd in the cd drive. Since there's nothing on the logical drive, it tries the cd.

Gentoo livecd message. You all know it.
boot:

loading gentoo....
loading gentoo.igz......
Ready.

And there you have it. Any suggestions? I can get all the crap I omitted, word for word, if someone thinks it might help. I got what I figured were the important parts. I'm just pressed for time right now before I leave for work :)


Edit: I solved it. I'm not sure what did it, I changed about four things at once and tried to boot, and voila, it booted. So I did something right :)

Edit #2: I figured out exactly what it was. In the bios, it had an option on what to scan for first, Embedded PCI devices, or Slot-based PCI devices. I changed it to Slot from Embedded, and the livecd booted.