Server needs optical drive

I just purchased a Refurbished Varari 1U rack server for Linux development. The specs are great, but it doesn't have an optical drive installed. What specs I have for the unit says that it takes a "slim" CD or DVD drive. I take that to mean a laptop form factor drive. The four hard drive bays are SATA, but I haven't seen a lot of laptop CD or DVD drives with SATA, and for all I know, the optical interface uses EIDE. The unit hasn't arrived yet, and I was hoping to find something before it does.

Does anyone have any insight on these machines that might help me find an optical drive for it?

Slim drives typically use their own connector that you get adapters for. It comes down to what you want to get and what your server can support. This should be found in the unit's documentation (motherboard specs, typically). If not, you may need to wait to physically see the system to see what ports you have available.

Slim-to-PATA



Slim-to-SATA

Does it have USB? It likely does, if anything else you can get a USB optical driver and should be able to use it not just for this machine, but for any others you might acquire.

That is the other option If I can't get this to work. It does have USB.

Can I back up a step: Why do you want an optical drive?

I have several servers that I've never used the drive on. They had some OS from the factory, I downloaded the OS I wanted, installed it and never looked back.

A lot (all?) motherboards these days will boot fine from a USB flash drive, and a 2GB flash drive is dirt cheap and enough for 95% of all OS, and a bigger one is not much more expensive and will even handle the latest Windows things.

Backup over the Ethernet. Skip the optical drive. Save money.
YMMV

This machine is clean, no OS. I need CentOS 5.x on it and the only way I have experience loading it is via optical. I know using a flash drive is possible, but I can get a slim drive for around the same price (unless it's external). I need to get it up and running quickly, because I have a project to use it for. Hopefully it wont be difficult to find something, otherwise I probably will be learning about booting and installing from a FD.

I'd just use an external usb cd to install the OS, assuming your bios allows booting from an external drive. That way you'll have a cd drive for the next server. Once the OS is installed you can mount iso of cd's and in most cases you don't need a physical drive

Ok so the update on this is, the machine arrived. Good condition and I was able to boot from a USB stick and do a http network install of CentOS. I brought the machine back up from the install and adjusted the bios to put the hard disk first in boot order. When the machine went to boot, I got nothing but a blinking cursor.

Obviously the drive is fine, because the install went without a hitch and there were no other warnings. My boss mentioned that it could be that the drive is set to be a slave. There are four SATA hot swap bays in this machine and I have no way of knowing if the one drive that came with the machine is the primary. Is this the most likely cause?

Are you sure you didn't install it to the USB Flash Driver accidentally?

SATA drives do not offer master/slave configurations like PATA (IDE).

Both showed up in the installer. I unchecked the USB drive before it did it's partitioning. Easy enough to find out when I get home. I can also put the LiveCD files on the flash and boot from there. That would enable me to look at what is on the hard drive. My other thought was that there is something wrong with the way grub got installed.

I didn't think that SATA had master slave, that's why I asked here. It didn't seem right, but then my boss doesn't know that the machine has SATA. Any other potential bios settings that might be awry?

Again an update in the continuing saga. As it turns out, the installer for some reason insists on putting the boot files on the USB stick. I know that I took care to uncheck the USB drive on the partition screen and yet it still replaced the net install files on the USB stick with a syslinux directory. The machine will only boot, if the USB stick is inserted. Once it is booted, the stick can be removed.

I found a slim CD drive to put in the machine, but then another problem reared it's ugly head. I can't get the damn cover off the machine. There are two large blue buttons on the top panel that presumably you are supposed to be able to press inward and release the top panel. They appear to be stuck.

I have an IDE to USB adaptor, but it doesn't have the 2.5 inch slim IDE connector, only the large one.