Hi Everyone - Need some help. I cannot get any distribution to successfully install on my old SuperMicro server with 4CPU/8gb RAM & RAID controller (AOC-SAT2-MV8). It has 6 drives (6x 1TB of storage) - all distributions detect my drives, but usually fail with some kind of fatal error or if it completes successfully, will hang on boot. To simply installation, prior to install, I remove all drives except a single 1TB /dev/sda. I've also tried it with all drives. Not trying to duel boot anything - I remove all partitions prior to installing and give dedicate the entire drive to the install.

I've tried Mint 18 & 21, Fedora, CentOS 6 & 7 ... Does anyone have any suggestions on a distribution that might work - highly compatibility ? The only OS I've run on this box has been Windows 2003 Server, I would prefer to run something else.


Thank you in advance !

It might help to know more about the errors you are encountering. They might shed some light on what's going awry.

I know this is annoying suggestion, but it might be a good idea to try an install and copy or photograph the error messages.

I'll do that - the errors vary by distribution.

I'd recommend trying Debian, Devuan, or Alpine. Though it would certainly help to know the specific error messages. Are the drives even still good? What does smartctl have to say about their states?

The drives had been in a RAID array - I believe they're in good working order. I do not see any read/write errors. I did have to use fdisk to remove a RAID flag for the drive to be recognized. I've also moved around the primary disk - I've probably tried about 3 of them as the primary. I'll try to get some more specific errors. I just downloaded slackware as I noticed several others running it on SuperMicro servers. I have not tried Debian, Devaun, or Alpine - thanks !

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These hard drives were part of a RAID array, so they should be in good shape. There are no read/write faults that I can notice. It was necessary for me to run fdisk to clear a RAID flag before the drive would be detected. Moreover, I've experimented with other disks as the primary, using as many as three. I'll see if I can find any more detailed errors. Having seen it installed on a number of other SuperMicro servers, I decided to give slackware a try. I'm not familiar with Debian, Devaun, or Alpine, so I appreciate the recommendation.

Are you sure you got all of the RAID metadata off of the drives? You may need to run wipefs -a against them (do this from a live environment), and/or zero out chunks at the start and end, to make sure they're actually 'clean' and can be properly formatted.

If this 'fatal error' is from the ubuntu installer, that is a pretty generic/cryptic message that it provides on failure, so trying in a distro with a more verbose installer may help to at least give you some idea if there's a hardware issue (e.g. Oracle/Red Hat/Fedora that use Anaconda - it may still fail but it tends to be more verbose about *WHY* it failed, not just 'the installation could not continue, this is a fatal error' like ubuntu will present).