Installation headaches

Found myself a Dell Poweredge 2950II server used for sale.
32 GB of ECC RAM and had 2 15k rpm SCSI discs.

Added 4 3GB HDDs.

Installed OMV on system installing to a 16 GB thumb drive.

System sees thumb drive, and DVD but no hard drives.

Power lites are on.
System fans are very very loud so I can't hear if the discs spin up.
Tried using gdisk to add a partion.
Still doesn't want to read.
Tried using gparted.
Can't see the discs using Storage>Physical Discs> search (or whatever its called)

Still no joy!

Any suggestions as to what to do to get drives read?

(The BIOS on the server is not much like any BIOS I have ever used.

Zitat von subzero79

I haven't deal with scsi disks, but are drives at least listed in BIOS?

No drives listed in the bios. Its a weird bios too. Looks like its written for just Dell servers!

Zitat von shadowzero

Do you know if there is a Perc 5i or 6i raid controller installed? You may need to go into the raid configuration and configure the drives. If you have already, I would check the firmware level on the raid controller. It might need to be updated, though…

There is something about a Perc 5 but I'm not seeing anything where I might be able to configure a raid.

There is a question about enabling SATA set 1 and set 2 which I changed from no to auto but this bios is real weird and I'm not sure what to change to get the discs to be read. (Know where it is usually but there isn't anything like that in this model!)

Thanks for the ideas!

I'm thinking that the disc controller board is DOA. There is no anything for setting up RAID in the setup process and I've checked every option about 4 times, so lots of flag waving for not much on my end!

All the hard drives go through one board and I can't even see anything from the system.
The USB stick and the DVD are working from different access points and I can see them.

Now to find a board (hopefully at a reasonable price!).

If I can get this working it will be a great box but . . .

I was quite wrong!

The command was Ctrl R .

That got me into a dialog where I was able to see 4 of the hard drives (the new ones) that are in a hardware raid system.
Hmmmmmmmmmmm - - - I would prefer using a software raid but this box doesn't give me that choice.

The other 2 drives were formatted to be part of a Raid 5 array and 2 drives can never be that.

So I have to find some way to reformat them.

There are 15k rpm Seagates (146 GB) - - - any ideas?

(Because they are part of another array the controller calls them foreign and won't do anything with them so I need to format them. That formatting takes a very very long time on big drives!!)

Thanking all for their assistance and support!!!

Rereading my last message and there is some ambiguity!

In the boot up process there are a number of places to get into different aspects of the bios. (You will likely have something to do at every point and information about what to do is something I have not been able to find!)

One sets up the raid arrays and therewith the hard drives when you are told press Ctrl r (this is about the time your screen tells you that the hard drives are initializing).

I'm thinking that for someone who is reading this thinking that the Poweredge 2950 is a reasonable purchase - - - I would suggest something a little newer. The bios doesn't recognize any more than 4 TB of space (and 4 3-TB drives in raid 10 should have more than that - - - but oh well I got a machine with 32 GB of ECC RAM and room for 6 drives - - - ) so I will live with this for a while!