Installation on Dell PowerEdge 2900 not starting

[cwfreenas]

Hello

I'm owning a Dell PowerEdge 2900 ( 2x Xeon Dual Core 3Ghz, 8GB Ram)

and want t install FreeNas on it.

I burned the Iso (tryed x64 and x86) and booted from the CD.

I got the boot menu showed (tryed to run safe mode, acpi disabled , verbosed enabled).

After this step the System got stuck, only showing "Booting..." with blue background and in the top left edge a blinking "Z" on green background.

Any tips to get the system up to install it ?

Dell PowerEdge 2900, 1 HDD via onboard SATA #1 connected, DVD Drive via onboard SATA #2,no Raid Controller installed.

 

[cyberjock]

If you check out Dell's page on that server it says this...

Microsoft® Windows® Small Business Server 2008
Microsoft® Windows® Essential Business Server 2008
Microsoft Windows® Server 2008 SP2, x86/x64 (x64 includes Hyper-V™ )
Microsoft Windows® Server 2008 R2, x64 (includes Hyper-V™ v2)
Microsoft® Windows® HPC Server 2008
Novell® SUSE® Linux Enterprise Server
Red Hat® Enterprise Linux

Notice FreeBSD is not on that list. Almost always that means FreeBSD won't run.

 

[ZFS Noob]

The problem is likely that you need to go into the BIOS and make sure that the USB port is being treated as a hard drive, both during install and boot (note that changing it while a USB CDROM is attached works for install, but when you remove the USB CDROM the USB stick suddenly acquires different settings.) I went through some headaches with both an R710 and a 2970 when installing FreeNAS, and diddling with the BIOS settings eventually resolved it. Sorry, I don't remember exactly what I had to do.

With that said, the R710 is running great, with a SAS/6i controller in place of the original PERC card. When I tried to replace the PERC on the 2970 the BIOS panicked, and the best I could do was export each individual drive as a RAID0 volume.

Good luck. Dell gear is nice in some ways, and maddening in others.