i have a dell server. its a couple of years old and has a perc 4 raid controller in it. When i do an install it shows the drives configured in the raid 5 configuration. i select the disk and do an auto partition. It goes for about 10min then errors with "error formatting drive volgoup00\ the error is serious occurred press enter to reboot" or something like that can remember all the words. It doesn't give any info about the error.

i get the same error on centOs 5.5 and Ubuntu server 10.10

There is a firmware update for the raid controller that i could apply but dell's site was not letting me download it yesterday. Other than that I am not sure what to do. I could try an older version of CentOS 5.4 but i figure someone might tell me how to fix this so i can run the newest version.

thanks

Hello,

CentOS 5.5 has all the support for the PERC 4, you might want to log into the card BIOS and fully initialize the RAID logical volume, then try to install the OS again.
It's finding the card and the RAID and giving it a name "volgroup00", but fails to forma it in both OSes, sounds like you might need to initialize the RAID array in the PERC BIOS.

You can find the latest Firmware udpates for it in support.dell.com.

Good luck!

I was able to get the os to install after i did a low level format on all the drives.