My system has:
PowerEdge 600SC
BIOS Rev. A09 (no updates on Dell site for this)
PowerEdge Expandable RAID Controller BIOS 3.35
PERC 3/SC
2 SCSI HDDs that were wiped and reconfigured into RAID1
DVD-ROM/CD-RW
The DVD drive will only read CDs, but (as far as I know) in order to update anything I need the DVDs; I already tried several CD applications from the site, to no avail.
It's not the DVD drive, as I tried a different one and had the same problem. I even switched the jumpers from CS to MA, and also putting it from Primary IDE to Secondary IDE. The BIOS says it is a CR-ROM Reader (maybe it's supposed to say this, maybe not- I don't know). Any ideas for this? I want to install Debian onto this system.
Also...
After I installed "Disk Utilities" from a CD (from Dell website) this is what happens when I try to F10 into it:
Loading PBR for descriptor 1...done.
Bad PBR signature
Any ideas for that? I tried to install the Disk Utilities to try to resolve the first problem... Dell, what a PoS, but it's the only server I have.
Workaround:
Because of my very specific situation, I have connected an ethernet cord from the server to my other PC to share internet access and am currently installing Debian from the "net-install" CD I downloaded. The reason I didn't do this first is because I read I needed to update some firmware in order to do this- apparently not. I will try to update as to whether or not I can get the DVD drive to recognize DVDs.
Update: The Debian net installer didn't work, either because of a corrupt disk/iso or because of failure to connect to the internet/driver_issue. I have now started to install from the offline 8 CD set; fingers crossed.