Intel 64 bit CPUs and Debian

I’m repurposing an old-ish Dell PowerEdge 850 as a VMware Server development & test box at the moment. It’ll be replacing an even older PowerEdge SC400 (where “SC” stands for “super cheap”). It was running Windows 2003 Web Edition quite happily, but I’d rather stick a stripped out Linux distro on it to get the last bit of performance out of it.

The server originally came practically free with some disk arrays we bought a while back so I wasn’t expecting the best, but was still slightly peeved when I saw it only had a CD-ROM drive, so my copious quantities of DVD+/-R media were useless. Off I went to my local mirror and downloaded the “ia 64 netinst” CD image and I burned it to my last CD-R. I bunged it in the drive and hit the switch and it booted straight into Windows….. I tried a bootable Windows CD and it booted off that fine. Hmmm. So I Googled and found this. apparently if you want to use an E64MT CPU you need the AMD 64 bit install CD, rather than the ia64 one, which only works on Itanium CPUs. I’m off to the shop now to buy more CDs.

Re: Debian Installer on DELL PowerEdge 850/860