Mandrake Installation on Proliant ML 350

[Haithem Abdelkefi]

I m trying to install Mandrake 8.2 on HP Proliant ML350 G3 without success.
The installation hangs on the partitionning step. It seems that the HP Smart Array 641 is not recognized by Mandrake.
Just to test I installed Windows 2000 Server successufly on the machine.
Where can I find the right drivers for the smart array on mandrake?
by the way, at the boot, i have the message "SCSI BIOS Not Installed"
Any helps?
TIA, Haithem

[Prashant (I am Back)]

Hi,

You are very right about the support the drivers are not avaible. Following link can explain it much better what are the choices we have in case of linux.

http://h18004.www1.hp.com/products/servers/linux/hpLinuxcert.html

Regards,
Prashant S.

[Luca Olivetti]

As you will see from that link there's no support from hp for modern distributions. That's a hard learnt reason why I'd never recommend hp: I'm only having problems with the one they decided to buy here, it's constantly hanging for no apparent reason.
Anyway, you can install mandrake 10.0 if you select the alt1 image for booting (there's a problem in the installer and won't detect the array with the standard kernel, alt1 will use kernel 2.4 for the installation, but you can boot 2.6 afterwards). All the needed drivers that aren't available in "supported" distributions are right there in mandrake default kernel, so everything should work right out of the box.
Remember that if you use kernel 2.6 you cannot install the hpasm closed source module for hardware monitoring, since it doesn't compile with kernel 2.6 (one more reason to avoid hp altogether).
If you're lucky you won't experience the continued hangs I'm experiencing (maybe the ml350 is better than the ml370 I have).