# Installing FreeBSD 9.1 on Poweredge R310



## jaymeh (Aug 20, 2013)

Hi all,

I am currently having issues with FreeBSD installation on a Dell PowerEdge R310 machine. I have been struggling with this for over a week and would appreciate any help on the matter. I have basically tried installing versions 6.2, 7.4, 8.4 and 9.1. 

FreeBSD 7.4 seemed to install okay but when I tried to do any upgrading to 8 the machine would display the mountroot prompt. From which I would type in ? to display all options then doing ufs:/ followed by all items returned in that list. In mountroot the following errors would be displayed error 6 or error 19. This may not help but I am trying to install the Operating system using iDrac 6. 

I have even tried booting up a live version of FreeBSD 9.1 and used the sysinstall command to install through FTP. This however resulted in the following error message after trying to setup the partitions:


```
error mounting /dev/mfid1s1a on / : No such file or directory
```

I am running the system with a H700 RAID card which I believe is not compatible with FreeBSD but I am not 100% sure of this. 

After googling around for issues with this particular RAID card none of them seemed to apply to my current situation which is why I am currently posting this thread. Any help would be greatly appreciated.

Thanks
Jamie


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## jaymeh (Aug 21, 2013)

*SSD Issues*

After digging around it seemed that there was an issue with the SSD's in the system not being able to be written to. This therefore stopped the operating system being installed. To rectify this I just installed FreeBSD 8.4 onto the other hard drive.


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## Terry_Kennedy (Aug 28, 2013)

jaymeh said:
			
		

> This may not help but I am trying to install the Operating system using iDrac 6.


Virtual media can be problematic, regardless of what manufacturer is involved. The usual issue is that it is detected when booting from it, but later on in the boot process it either disappears or reports errors. Ths is because the early stages of booting use the BIOS interface, and the BIOS certainly knows how to talk to its virtual media. Once FreeBSD drivers take over, the virtual media's emulation may be insufficient (or completely missing), leading to the problems I mentioned. Sometimes it is possible to modify the driver to get around the issues, sometimes not.

This only applies to you if you were trying to use iDRAC virtual media - the iDRAC works fine as a remote console server.



> I am running the system with a H700 RAID card which I believe is not compatible with FreeBSD but I am not 100% sure of this.


I have multiple PowerEdge R710's with PERC H700 RAID cards on FreeBSD 8.3 and 8.4:

```
mfi0: <Dell PERC H700 Integrated> port 0xfc00-0xfcff mem 0xde1bc000-0xde1bffff,0xde1c0000-0xde1fffff irq 33 at device 0.0 on pci3
mfi0: Using MSI
mfi0: Megaraid SAS driver Ver 4.23 
mfi0: FW MaxCmds = 1008, limiting to 128
mfi0: [ITHREAD]
mfip0: <SCSI Passthrough Bus> on mfi0
```
Other than the driver being a bit verbose and needing to set a sysctl to make the invidial drives visible to sysutils/smartmontools, it works fine.

*IMPORTANT NOTE* - if you are running version 12.0.5 of the H700 firmware, upgrade to 12.0.6 at the earliest opportunity. Dell omitted many previous fixes which were present in 12.0.4 when they built 12.0.5. This can lead to data loss. This isn't a FreeBSD issue - it affects any operating system on that hardware. Look for the following line in your dmesg(8) output:

```
mfi0: 2432 (boot + 35s/0x0020/info) - Package version 12.10.6-0001
```


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