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unable to do any kind of live install on old dell R200's
This is kind of an odd problem I've been working on the last few months. Note that last summer (2023), I installed Ubuntu 22.04 on all my Dell R200 servers using a usb flash drive with the relevant Ubuntu installer. However, when I went to install 24.04 on them (this is a set of approximately 15 servers we use for assorted university student projects) it was a complete no go:
1) I could not install via PXEBOOT (it stalls at the cloud-init point and will NOT advance from there)
2) I could not install via usb boot disk (I took care to find a usb 2.0 stick in case that mattered). Doesn't matter what I do, it drops me into grub_rescue and only shows iso9660 filesystems so I can't even set initrd/vmlinuz manually at this point. I used both disk-creator and unetbootin, it made no difference
3) I could not install from CD's -- even using boot mode, it simply ignored the CD and went straight to the hard disk. I verified that they could read the CDs once boot to 22.04 finished
Note that for each of these three methods, my non R200 servers (including a set of Dell R300 servers) were able to install 24.04 with no issues.
I then checked whether I could install 22.04-- and ran into the same problem. It's kind of like something timed out on all of them at the same time to refuse to recognize the live installation process?
I finally updated them through do-release-upgrade when that became available last week. But I'm curious if anyone has an idea of what's going on here? Ultimately, since these are our oldest servers, I will probably retire/surplus them sooner rather than later, but it BUGS me that I have no idea what's going on unless it's some kind of bios bug?
I appreciate any insights. I realize these servers are so old as to basically be zombies but they provide useful hands on bare-metal learning experiences for our students.
DELL-Young E
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September 4th, 2024 01:47
Hello thanks for choosing Dell and welcome to our community.
Your system R200 is quite out of date and there’s really nothing much that we can help with for this situation. To install newly published OS ((Ubuntu 22.04 LTS, April 21, 2022)) to a model that is at least 16 years is old is a risky job and no one could expect what is going to happen afterwards.
Respectfully,
cse-sysnet
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September 4th, 2024 22:59
Hmmm.... I respectfully disagree, because in general Linux distros are quite good with very old servers, much more so than Windows, certainly. Since the problem appears well before any installation even happens, I'm also skeptical that the distro is to blame for this. I'm also seeing folks elsewhere on these communities discussing servers even older than these (which is partly why I went ahead and asked, to see if anyone else was familiar with this or had dealt with this before.
One question I would have is whether the last BIOS update that was made available for these servers is still available anywhere?
DELL-Young E
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September 5th, 2024 03:45
Hello,
https://dell.to/4e8y7iM
Supported Operating Systems | Dell US
"Note regarding operating systems not listed above:
Dell may not support an operating system for various reasons, including discontinued support from the software vendor, lack of availability with certain products, or other reasons."
You could try with the OS vendors at this point but I'm afraid this is all I could offer at this point.
Respectfully,
cse-sysnet
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September 6th, 2024 04:24
Sure that's fine. I'm well aware these servers are beyond ancient. I'm more trying to crowd-source similar experiences etc.
Another item to note: pxeboot of these servers to 22.04 works just fine. It's 24.04 that comes to a halt on that cloud-init thing; which is why I think that's a bug in the installer (I've been making appropriate queries about that elsewhere, of course). It's just that this is happening to every single Dell R200 we have at once. Anyway thank you for your responses. I will remain hopeful that someone else might have pointers or info to pass along my way...
cse-sysnet
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September 6th, 2024 04:27
(I mean actually these servers are a testament to Dell's durability etc... many of them still have the original disks, memory, etc. I don't think I've replaced more than a handful of disks, and mostly just to have more disk space than because of failures. I haven't had memory failures here that I can recall, and so on. These guys just keep chugging on.)