Installing Legacy Red Hat on Dell PowerEdge 14G with Perc10 RAID via iDRAC Virtual Media

Background

Dell EMC released the PowerEdge 14G server and the next‑generation 12 Gb Perc10 RAID cards (H740/H740P) in July 2017. The H740 cards provide larger cache, a better controller, and higher I/O performance compared with the previous H730 model.

Compatibility and Problem

The H740 RAID cards are officially supported on Red Hat 7U4, which includes native drivers for the Dell EMC 740/740P cards. However, many users still run older Linux releases such as Red Hat 6.6/6.7/6.8 or Red Hat 7.0‑7.2. When installing these older OS versions on a server with an H740 RAID card, the installer cannot find any disks unless the RAID driver is loaded manually.

Solution for Red Hat 7U2 and Earlier

For Red Hat 7U2 (and earlier) or CentOS equivalents, the Dell iDRAC remote‑management card’s virtual CD‑ROM can be used to load the driver without any physical media:

Boot the server with the Red Hat 6.6 (or other) ISO and, at the boot prompt, type linux dd.

When prompted to insert a driver disk, detach the OS installation media, attach the dd.iso (the RAID driver image) via the iDRAC virtual CD, complete the driver update, then re‑attach the OS media and continue installation.

Solution for Red Hat 7.2 and Later

Starting with Red Hat 7.2, the driver‑loading strategy changed, and the previous virtual‑CD method no longer works. Red Hat recommends copying the driver ISO to a USB stick and inserting it during boot. If a USB stick is unavailable, the driver can be placed on an internal network share and loaded via the boot parameter inst.dd=<URL> (e.g., inst.dd=https://example.com/dd.iso).

Step‑by‑Step Using iDRAC Virtual Floppy

Rename the RAID driver dd.iso to dd.img and mount it as a virtual floppy through the iDRAC virtual media feature.

At the boot loader screen, press Tab and append linux dd to the kernel command line.

When the installer reaches the driver prompt, /dev/sr0 will be the OS media and /dev/sda the virtual floppy; select /dev/sda to load the RAID driver.

After the driver loads, refresh the iDRAC console to see the H740 RAID disks and continue the normal installation process.

Additional Notes

Officially supported operating systems include Windows, Red Hat, SUSE Linux Enterprise, and Ubuntu 16.04 Server. When using Ubuntu 16.04 with the H740 RAID card, select the Hardware‑Enablement (HWE) kernel mode to avoid disk detection issues.

While using a network share for the driver (e.g., inst.dd=https://example.com/dd.iso) is possible, many administrators prefer the iDRAC virtual media method because it works without PXE or additional hardware and can be applied concurrently to multiple servers.

Always use Dell‑supported OS versions when possible; they are listed on Dell’s official support site.