Setting up Ubuntu 8.10 (Intrepid Ibix) on a Dell PowerEdge 2400 in a RAID1 configuration

Saturday 01/17/2009  –  Category: Uncategorized

Thanks to this guide and this post, I was able to setup Ubuntu 8.10 (Intrepid Ibix) on a Dell Poweredge 2400 in a RAID1 configuration.

I ran into more than a few hurdles along the way:

• The first iso I burned was corrupted...I suspect it was because I had paused/resumed the download a few times. Grr.
• On my first install attempt I just installed onto one hard drive.  Upon booting up, I got this message:

Loading...
Gave up waiting for the root device.
Alert /dev/disk/by-uuid/cf921ca07-7fa3-4031-a5de-44099fd5b82a does not exist.

• After I found that first guide I properly partitioned and formatted all 5 drives in a RAID1 configuration.  After booting, I got this message:

Gave up waiting for root device. Common problems:
...
ALERT! /dev/md0 does not exist. Dropping to a shell!

Google yielded this second post that suggested to add rootdelay=40 to your grub kernel line so /boot/grub/menu.lst looks like:

kernel   /boot/vmlinuz-2.6.27-4-server root=UUID=401eb0e1-f624-4d86-a1a4-47374ba9a556 rootdelay=40 ro quiet splash

• To get to the grub bootloader screen, hit ESC and you should see your partitions.  Hitting 'E' will bring up a prompt to edit the command.  Hit enter to accept and the hit 'B' to boot from that partition. Once you've booted successfully, make sure you edit /boot/grub/menu.lst because the grub editor didn't seem to save my changes.

Phew.  So after a few hours of trial and error, googling and fixing, I finally got things up and running.

The End.