I just purchased two used Macintosh Xserve G5s, however, they were configured very unusually. Rather then an Apple-branded video adapter they had a third party video adapter, the Village Tronic MPDD Pro.
The first Xserve doesn't have a RAID card, so attempted to install it first. When I tried installing OS X 10.4 Panther Server from DVD-ROM, it would start up OK, however, as soon as the bios was complete and the OS was started, the screen would go blank. My best guess is that there are no drivers for this card by default in the OS X installer DVD.
My first attempt was to boot the Xserve with FireWire Target Disk mode, and install using my Powerbook. I was able to use Disk Utility to mirrored software RAID drives 1 & 2, however, the installer would not let me install the RAID volume in FireWire Target Disk mode. So I installed the server on the spare drive 3. This worked up to very basic level, but even once installed, once OS X started, the video display would still die. Thus the drivers for this video card are not only not on the installer, they are not included with the system. So I couldn't finish the installation without a display.
As you can do a fresh install of OS X on headless Xserve with no video card at all, my next attempt was to use that technique. I got that working after a lot of pain searching for the correct serial number, which is used as the default password. This time I was able to install OS X on the mirrored software RAID volume. However, once you install, how do you install a video driver? I've never figured out how to remotely turn on Apple Remote Desktop and to configure it to turn on the "VNC viewers may control screen with password" option. So without the GUI, how do I install that driver?
So next I booted my Powerbook on the freshly installed OS X Server using FireWire Target Disk mode. This gave me the GUI, and was able to install the video drivers. I had to reboot twice to get them to work, but now my video card was working and I could use my regular monitor and keyboard.
I am mystified how the company that I bought the used Xserves from installed their OS X Server. It was clear to me from their setup of their machines that they had little experience with OS X Server, and I doubt that they installed using my technique. So either it came from CDW with the video driver already installed, or they figured out some other technique.
Now that I've got the first Xserve running, next I've got to try the same technique on the next Xserve, which has a hardware RAID card. Apparently the installer doesn't understand the RAID card, so you have to ssh into the installer and use the CLI (command-line interface) to configure the RAID. I'm not looking forward to it.
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