You may have seen in my last post, that I am going to scrap my quite power hungry home server and rebuild it to make it more power saving.

The Intel D525MW motherboard turned up with a Wireless card and 2GB of RAM. It was purchased from a guy on eBay in the end because the previous company didn’t have it in stock… I stuck another 1GB of RAM on the board and removed the wireless card. I installed the 16GB SSD, powered it up and inserted the Ubuntu Server 11.04 CD in the drive. Going through the installation, it couldn’t find it. This doesn’t surprise me as I created a post on the Intel forums on the day I purchased both the motherboard and SSD, and a day later I had a reply saying this…

Hello, deanpcmad; thank you for your interest in our Desktop Boards.
I apologize for the inconvenience, but Intel(R) Desktop Board D525MW was not designed
to work with PCIe SSDs, so we do not expect this configuration will work.

That’s a shame. So after trying and failing I just stuck a spare 2.5” SATA hard drive in and got installing Ubuntu Server 11.04. The installation went a breeze :)

When restarting Ubuntu, it would just hang on restarting now. Looking on the Intel Forums and online, the latest BIOS update fixed this exact problem. Great! Turns out it would be easier to install the BIOS update with Windows. So I stuck another drive in which already had Windows 7 on it and it booted up straight away. Opened task manager and I saw 4 cores. Pretty cool :)

Updated the BIOS fixed the problem, so I now have a fully working Ubuntu Server. I managed to move my mdadm RAID 1 array easily and will be adding another 2 2TB drives shortly and creating another RAID 1 array.