James Little

Installing CentOS 5 on a Dell R200

16 comments

Last update: October 23rd, 2009


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This is the latest value rackmount offering from Dell. It’s a great spec for the price, but installation of CentOS 5 seems surprisingly difficult, thanks to the SATA DVD drive used in the unit. RHEL/CentOS doesn’t have the driver for the controller so can’t find the DVD during installation. I’m sure there are other workarounds (network install, USB DVD drive etc.), but eventually I got hold of a Redhat driver disk from Dell Support (it doesn’t seem to be on the Dell site btw).

I’ve uploaded the disk image here; just uncompress it and copy the .img file onto a USB key. At the installation command-prompt type ‘linux dd’ and then hit Enter. You’ll then be asked for the location of the driver disk image; just navigate to the USB disk, select the image, and you’re in business.

SATA driver disk
.zip version

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Written by James Little

February 15th, 2008 at 7:51 pm

Posted in Hardware,Linux

Tagged with , ,

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  • Jiryih Tsaur

    Hi James,

    I have tried both 7-zip and PowerArchive and none of them can open the gz file.

    What format was it in?

  • admin

    That’s strange, i Gzipped it at the command-line. I’ve uploaded a zip file as well: http://www.jameslittle.me.uk/wp-content/uploads/2008/02/ata_piix-2001dell-manykernels-ddimg.zip

  • anonymous coward

    Thanks for posting this driver, very useful.

    Also the .gz unzips fine with gunzip.

    Thanks again!

  • Lars

    Thank you very much! You safe my nerve. ;) Works fine. Respects from Germany!

  • http://www.visualsoftspace.com Visualsoftspace

    Thanks for the file and the information. I had been banging my head against the wall trying to get a CentOS 5 install completed this morning, and without your post I’m sure I would have wasted even more time. Thanks for the file, and the excellent post!!!

  • r0xarena

    Thank you for posting the driver.

    I Have to install 2 Linux servers and 2 windows servers by friday.

    Without this I’ll be scratching my head to find out how to install Centos 5 on the PowerEdge R200.

    Really, thanks.

  • http://goulburn.net.au David

    Thanks 10^6.

  • sean

    thank you very much!!That is my requestion!

  • CF

    saved me a lot of time, thanks

  • amila

    thanx buddy, you are a god

  • Ali

    Need more Help!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!
    i used the driver on the page to install the oracle linux 5.0.
    After the installation its again not reading the cddvd rom drive. Tried the driver on the current page didnt work. Any more ideas that you can help me with. It will be great help.

  • Daniel Morales

    sorry, but you did the same with sas disk?

  • http://www.jameslittle.me.uk James Little

    Hi Daniel, no I didn't try with an SAS disk on the R200. You may have to contact Dell support to get the right driver.

  • Daniel Morales

    Thank you

  • Philippe

    Hello James,

    I'm facing the same problem (My CentOS DVD does not see the cdrom).
    My cd drive is a pioneer dvr-112d and the image file that you nicely provide here is not working for me.
    I think I need a “ATA/ATAPI-7, SFF-8090″ driver. That's what the Pioneer doc says:
    http://www.pioneer.be/be/produ…

    I don't find the appropriate file. Do you know where I should look for ?

    Thanks a lot !
    Philippe

  • http://virusremovalhelps.com/help-system-fix-virus-removal/ remove system fix virus

    thx buddy, you are a life saver!