[ILUG] problems installing Centos4.1 on PowerEdge

[Ivan Griffin]

Hi,

I have a PowerEdge 1300 with 2xPIII 500MHz processors, 896MB RAM, 2x9GB
SCSI disks (SW RAID1 - boot only), and 2x250GB SATA drives (off a
HighPoint RocketRAID 1520 card, but SW RAID1 - storage).

The system is happily running RH9.0, and serving out NFS, SMB and
Appletalk for me.  I've been using fedoralegacy to keep it someway up to
date.

Recently, I decided I'd switch to Centos4.1 (2.6.x kernel?), but I can't
get the PowerEdge to boot off the CD - a kernel panic somewhere after
discovering the two SATA drives - scrolls by too quick to see where.  Any
ideas what could be gone wrong? I tried booting with noprobe, but didn't
make any difference.

I imagine it is some weird issue with either (A) smp, (B) the RocketRAID
card (even though it isn't configured in the BIOS to do mirroring or
striping), or (C) a johnny-noname USB2.0 card I recently added to the box.

Either way, the hardware config as is works fine with RH9.0 (with a 2.4.20
kernel)

My next step is to try going back down the Centos releases to see if I can
find a kernel that will actually run on box, and then to compare forward
to see if I can isolate the issue.