I’ve recently decided to repurpose my HP N40L Proliant MicroServer, loaded in some spare 500GB hard drives (bringing the total to 4x 500GB split between Western Digital Caviar Blue and generic Hitachi drives) and put Ubuntu Server 14.04 on it.

Preface

HP produces a brilliant (in my experience) line of microservers under the ProLiant label and I managed to pick up an N40L some time ago on special at my local computer shop. Now against all reason I’m also setting it up as a 2TB RAID0 hardware array because I don’t expect it to be doing anything serious or at least anything that won’t be regularly backed up.

Possible Issues

When setting up Ubuntu, it will realise that you have a RAID array present, allow it to activate and work with it. When you’re setting up petitions, I decided to use entire disk but without LVM as I simply needed a swap and main partition taking up the whole array.

When it gets to installing GRUB, it may have problems installing it to the default (/dev/mapper), which isn’t the proper name of the array. To fix this up, hit CTRL+ALT+F2 and press Enter to start using a terminal prompt. From there, type ls -l /dev/mapper, hit enter and you should see your RAID array listed there. Copy that name down, press CTRL+ALT+F1 to go back to the install and append the array name to /dev/mapper and press enter to install it there.