Hi Kalliman,
I don't imagine it's going to be very easy to get CentOS 6 to work on the 2850 due to their relative age difference. The last release RHEL supported on the 2850 was 5. It was probably a good idea to use text mode since the new Anaconda graphical installer is certainly too much for the 2850's limited integrated graphics and I would have suggested you try that if you hadn't mentioned it. I'm not sure what the deal with the password is. Are you logging in to a tty or SSH? By default in RHEL 6 SSH root logins are disabled, so maybe your password is in fact working? If it's the tty (and the password is indeed not working) then I would suggest as a diagnostic procedure to do a password reset according to the procedure documented here: vicker313.wordpress.com/.../recover-root-password-in-rhel6 You don't have to make it blank, just trying to see if resetting it (to anything at all!) will enable you to log in. Finally, the last thing I would suggest considering is if you are using 64-bit CentOS 6, try 32-bit instead. I know it is a 64-bit CPU in the 2850 but I have seen newer Linux distros in 64-bit do poorly on older hardware (random reboots), while 32-bit worked fine. Let me know what you find out and how it goes!