RHEL 5.0 on HP G6 Proliant

So, we got a new hardware for testing our product. Great, finally. To make sure that we test as close to what we consider Live, we have produced a system image with all required software pre-installed.

It worked perfectly when we provisioned it on our new dev environment.

However this time, we couldn’t get any more DL360 G5 boxes and had to go with a 6th generation.
Being a bit naive, I thought that HP would be considering but no… they screwed up compatibility between newer SmartArray 410i and slightly older 400i so basically our not so new RedHat didn’t see the new controller.

Simple solution  is to install new kernel and drivers. But how? when your system is not bootable.

Well, tried many things but the thing which worked well, was pulling the drives out from new server and sliding them in to G5 which was conveniently laying around. Installing new kernel and drivers and voila! boots on G6. Oh kernel came courtesy of CentOS 5.4 so that version was supported by HP drivers!