Do you HAVE to use Debian?
If not, you may wish to consider RedHat Enterprise Linux/CentOS (Or Fedora 7) for use with this machine. Dell usually provides drivers for RedHat/CentOS (free version of RedHat Enterprise Linux) on CDs provided with the server.
NOTE: Don't bother trying to install anything older than RedHat/CentOS Enterprise Linux 4.4 on this machine. Earlier versions don't include the necessary drivers for the PERC card, and, therefore, would require a convoluted, tedious and very time-consuming installation procedure involving the Dell-provided server installation software.
Skip all that.
If you go with RHEL4.4 or later, all the drivers come bundled in to the operating system distribution, itself, so you can just install directly off those CDs.
I do not know if the "Server CD" installation media would work, though. I am pretty sure it, too, includes the necessary Dell PERC driver modules, so it is probably worth a try. If you use the "Server CD" (which affords an installation requiring only one little CD, rather than five or six CDs or DVDs). You get the advantage of installing the rest of the distribution over the internet using 'groupinstall'.
On the other hand, if Debian is required, then I suggest you go with the very latest SARGE. Woody is way too old and won't have the drivers (in particular) for your PERC/5i card. You can download the first Sarge DVD and try that. If it works (and contains the necessary drivers), you could then proceed with the installation of this DVD, and then do the rest of the install (what would otherwise come on the second through fourth DVDs) over the 'net.
If Sarge does not include the drivers you need, you can go to Dell's website for this machine and see if they have the necessary driver modules you need there, download them, extract them (they will probably come in a tgz, a bz2, or a zip file. Uncompress them, and burn them onto a CD, preferably in the root directory of the CD, rather than in a subdirectory. Then, boot the Dell 2950 off the DVD. I think Debian will either offer a prompt for a driver disk, or at least allow you to interrupt the boot process with "ctrl-break" or similar. You need to do this before it actually gets to the point of loading Linux, because you want to instruct the machine to load "linux -dd" instead of just "linux". The -dd switch (which you ought to research the use of on the internet) is how you get Linux to prompt you for a driver disk(s) to use as it boots up.
Once prompted for the driver disk, feed the machine the CDROM of the driver(s) you burned and just follow the instructions.
