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I have recently acquired a HP DL380 server and I'm tryig to install Ubuntu server on it.

The server came with no HDDs, so I have bought 2 72.3GB drives and installed them into the drives. There is still space for another 4 drives.

When I boot up the server, the HP BIOS like system starts and it seems to recognise the drives are there.

So, I tried to install Ubuntu and when I get to chose where I'd like to I install, I cannot seem to see the drives. There's only 4GB available, but this is not from the drives.

Has anyone ever setup Linux on these type of servers before?

Thanks

5 Answers 5

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I would have to agree with the rest, you need to setup the RAID on the server. Also remember that your HDD will be /dec/cciss/c0d0 or c0d1 depending on your raid config. This should help you determine if you are using the hard drives or not. Here is an example from a DL380 I have.

Filesystem            Size  Used Avail Use% Mounted on 
/dev/cciss/c0d0p1      11G  5.7G  4.7G  55% /
udev                  1.9G  380K  1.9G   1% /dev
/dev/cciss/c0d0p5    1004M   19M  934M   2% /home
/dev/cciss/c0d0p2     8.9G  1.3G  7.2G  15% /opt
/dev/cciss/c0d0p3      12G  6.6G  4.7G  59% /var
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Is this a G7? It's very likely that the 4GB you're seeing is from an SD card mounted on the motherboard. Diskless systems with on-board SD like this are frequently used as VMware ESXi nodes.

Anyway, you probably need to do a bit of tweaking to get the hard drives running. You'll need to go into the BIOS and make sure that the on-board RAID card is enabled as a boot device. After doing that, there will be a key combination you can press during the boot/POST process that will let you get in and configure the RAID card. Once there, you'll be able to add your two hard drives into a RAID1 array, which will be presented to the OS.

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  • +1 to enable boot from RAID (or whatever controller he stuck the disks on)
    – mfinni
    Jun 14, 2011 at 17:28
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    If it's a G7, the boot screen says F9 for Setup, F11 for Boot Disk menu. The screen doesn't list that F8 will enter ILO setup first, and then if you exit, you'll get to the RAID controller setup. See here for screenshots: kevinhooke.com/2017/10/30/… Dec 9, 2017 at 5:59
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Sounds like you've got a G4 model there perhaps (let us know the HP part number if possible, they're xxxxxx-yyy format), but HP disk controllers are notoriously fickle about only running HP disks - so you may be out of luck here, let us know what exact disk controller you're using too and the disks of course and we'll see what we can do.

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You probably have to configure the drives in the RAID BIOS. You can do them standalone (no RAID) or any of the RAID configs available with your disk config.

You don't say what generation the server is - I wonder if the 4 GB is an onboard flash drive.

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    That's a good point mfinni, unless you know about that (or the PSP-based ACU too of course) you could easily forget. Basically F8 on boot normally does it.
    – Chopper3
    Jun 14, 2011 at 17:25
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A bit of an update some years later, on this, this time with Debian.

I've recently acquired a DL380 Gen4 ProLiant server and installing Linux was a bit of a pinch.

First, use the BIO to whipe the disk array. I chose a RAID5 4 disks w/ no spare. Yielded 900gig out of the 4 320g drives.

The Debian net install is broken, even when you set the mirror to archive.debian.org/debian.

What finally worked was to download ISO CD images 1 and 2 out of

https://cdimage.debian.org/cdimage/archive/6.0.10/amd64/iso-cd/

Once you booted and started the install process, it will recognize the CD image and will ask you to scan the repositories on the other CD images you would have burned. Do this for disk 2 and you dont need to scan any more disk. Installation will proceed and opt to install base system and user tools. Grub will then install and the remainder of the steps.

Once that's done you'll be able to restart your machine into Debian. You'll be in text mode but from there, you can run aptitude and complete the install from the net.

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