I recently got a used Dell Poweredge 2650 for free. It has five hard drives that can be set up in a RAID 5 configuration or an SCSI configuration. I tried to install Windows Server 2008 on it, but the problem was no matter how many times and different configurations I tried, the system stopped every time and said "No boot medium found". Is there a way to fix this?

I would reccomend that you install Linux on it. Linux has very good support for RAID and is very good as a server OS. I use RAID 1 (because I only have 2 drives) on my home server which I also got for free. I would suggest Debian as the distro because it is very easy to install and has good support for everything I've needed to do.

+1 for Linux Debian.

I'd suggest Linux as well. Using Windows as an OS for a server is not ideal in your situation. Regarding RAID, are you at all familiar with the different versions of RAID? Personally, I'd shy away from RAID5. Sure, you get more space but you only have one failed drive in your setup. I'd suggest a RAID6, where you can suffer two simultaneous drive failures. I run a RAID6, albeit over five 2TB drives, and couldn't imagine stringing everything on my server over one backup drive.

I digress, I use my server as a NAS where I favor maximum redundancy and storage. Of course, if you plan to keep important documents on your server have a proper backup plan, even if it's just an external HDD that the server does automatic backups to; RAID is not a back up solution.

Well, I don't really have any use for RAID. I would prefer SCSI.

But my problem is, the server refuses to boot. I tried every DVD I have, and USBs, and none of them will work.

And I like Linux, but I might have to end up installing Windows because the server is supposed to be a server for a small army of Windows computers. :\

You can make a RAID array of SCSI drives. RAID is independent of how the disks are connected to the computer. I could make a raid device between 3 drives, 1 each of SCSI, IDE, and SATA, and it would work. If the server refuses to boot, check the bios settings to make sure that it is configured to boot off USB/DVD correctly.

The BIOS doesn't seem to have a setting for USB boot. It only has enable/disable CD drive. I was thinking about booting it with a floppy disc with Plop Boot Manager, but I can't find my only floppy.

I do have a laptop with Windows Server 2012 Datacenter. Could this be used to network boot the server, without adding any extra equipment besides maybe a crossover Ethernet cable?

I fifth or sixth the Linux suggestion. How old is this server? I haven't seen a machine that couldn't USB-boot in a very long time. Yes, assume it has a BIOS setting for network booting, you could run a TFTP server on the laptop to network-boot the server.

I'm confused. I'd like to think that you were warning him away from RAID0 and RAID1 and recommending RAID5 in their stead.

I'd never recommend RAID5, RAID0 or 1 has it's perks - I do have two low-space drives in a RAID0 - but 0 & 1 are almost as silly as a RAID5 in my opinion; there are everyday uses for 0 & 1, but 5 is terrible. Period.

This from the guy who did a recursive chown from / on a production server.

Anyway -- I disagree. -5 permits higher effective utilization at the cost of higher outage probability and somewhat lower performance than -0 or -1. It really comes down to your tolerance for outage probability, but I'm comfortable with one parity disk for up to four or five disks, at which point it's prudent to be concerned about the probability of a failure during rebuild (which is a function of rebuild time: access speed and disk size), which can be mitigated by moving up to -6.

Never mind that RAID is never a substitute for real backups.