Last night, with extensive assistance from Daniel, I parked my new Dell SC430 server into its permanent home — the rack in his back room.

After giving it Ethernet and a terminal server connection (GRUB over serial is madness!), I decided I’d also build it a new kernel with SMP, to take advantage of both CPU cores. So I downloaded some sources and went through menuconfig ticking things I needed, like tg3 for the Broadcom network card. Then build, reboot, and … kernel panic!

Trouble was, I hadn’t made an initrd (never been much a fan of those!) and by default, the driver for the SC430’s Intel ICH7 drive controller is built as a module. Ergo, no SATA chipset driver when the system boots, no mounting the root volume, and no joy.

After some hair-pulling, I finally enabled both the PATA and SATA drivers for the Intel PIIx and ICHx controllers (there are separate tickboxes — one listed under “ATA/ATAPI/MFM/RLL support”, and another under “SCSI low-level drivers”). Twas silly of me to not realise that SATA support is hidden underneath SCSI support in menuconfig …

If you have a Dell PowerEdge SC430, and can’t be bothered choosing kernel options yourself, this .config file (for 2.6.16.16) will build in everything you need for the system to boot, and give you modules for just about everything else. And it’s got EM64T and SMP, so you get dual-core 64-bit joy!