I inherited an IBM eServer with a 64bit P4 with hyper-threading. It has 8GB RAM and 4x 500GB SAS drives. I enjoy playing with a lot really retro computers and thought this would be a good system to bridge the gap allowing me to connect via serial without needing adapters, make floppy disks as needed, etc. but be able to run a modern OS with security updates so I could connect it to the internet.
I can't get ANY Linux distro to load on this thing. They ALL hang with a flashing curser. I've tried multiple 64bit distros. I thought maybe it was because the P4 x64 is missing several true 64bit instructions, so I tried several different 32bit flavors. Still with the same result. I even tried an old copy of Ubuntu from 2010 I had lying around.
I'm thinking, because this is a server and not a typical desktop, there is some driver I need that doesn't come with a typical iso. I can't boot from USB which is really annoying so I have to burn DVDs every time I try another distro.
Just to see if it was a hardware issue, I installed Windows 7 and Windows Server 2012 R2 both 64bit with absolutely no issues. Windows 10 32bit loaded with only half the RAM available, obviously, but the 64bit version wouldn't install because I'm missing PrefetchW. (I really don't want to run Windows on this thing.)
If the 2010 copy of Ubuntu had worked, I would have started looking at compiling my own kernel. But since that didn't work, I don't think it's a modern instruction that I'm missing that's causing the problem.
Any suggestions would be greatly appreciated.
I can't get ANY Linux distro to load on this thing. They ALL hang with a flashing curser. I've tried multiple 64bit distros. I thought maybe it was because the P4 x64 is missing several true 64bit instructions, so I tried several different 32bit flavors. Still with the same result. I even tried an old copy of Ubuntu from 2010 I had lying around.
I'm thinking, because this is a server and not a typical desktop, there is some driver I need that doesn't come with a typical iso. I can't boot from USB which is really annoying so I have to burn DVDs every time I try another distro.
Just to see if it was a hardware issue, I installed Windows 7 and Windows Server 2012 R2 both 64bit with absolutely no issues. Windows 10 32bit loaded with only half the RAM available, obviously, but the 64bit version wouldn't install because I'm missing PrefetchW. (I really don't want to run Windows on this thing.)
If the 2010 copy of Ubuntu had worked, I would have started looking at compiling my own kernel. But since that didn't work, I don't think it's a modern instruction that I'm missing that's causing the problem.
Any suggestions would be greatly appreciated.