If you arrived here, you’re probably spending your weekend doing this too, so perhaps I can save some of your weekend for you. Here’s how I did it. FYI, I’m using a PERC H730 hardware RAID controller with a 1.1TB virtual disk made up of 8 physical disks in RAID10 config. As the title says, this is a fresh DELL R630 and it has single processor and 128G of memory. See my notes below about using a 100g boot partition and creating a larger partition once you have the system up and running with grub installed in the MBR.

• Switch the BIOS boot mode from UEFI to BIOS.
• If you’re booting from a USB thumb drive, set that to your first boot device.
• Boot and hit CTRL-R to go into your raid controllers bios and blow away the virtual disk. Recreate a new identical one. You’re doing this to get rid of the GPT partition.
• Boot into ubuntu 14.10 server 64 bit.
• Go through installation and make sure you install openssh server because you won’t be able to access the console when you first boot.
• Also make sure that when you partition your disk, you don’t create one huge partition larger than a terabyte. Instead, you probably want to create a boot partition and then a larger partition. I use 100G boot partition and 1TB big partition which I create once I have the system up and running. When I tried to create a 1.1TB partition it has trouble installing grub into the MBR. Using UEFI or a GPT partition table might fix this but I haven’t gone down that rabbit hole and don’t really want to.
• The grub installation onto the MBR will fail. This is because if you’re installing from thumb USB, ubuntu switches the /dev/sda and /dev/sdb devices and tries to install grub onto your thumb drive instead of your hard drive. To fix this hit CTRL-ALT-F2 open a console, then run the following:
• chroot /target
• grub-install /dev/sdb
• update-grub
• Then hit CTRL-ALT-F1 and go back to your installation.
• Continue without installing a boot loader (because that’s what you just did).
• Once done, when you reboot, go back into the bios and disable booting from your thumb drive (or just unplug it if you’re not doing this remotely like I am).
• Boot into linux, except that all you’ll see is a blank screen at this point.
• SSH into the server.
• Edit /etc/default/grub
• Change the value of GRUB_CMDLINE_LINUX_DEFAULT to be “vga=normal nofb nomodeset video=vesafb:off i915.modeset=0”.
• Run update-grub2
• Reboot and your console should now work and also won’t freeze up.

Congrats, I just saved you a few hours. Go enjoy them.