Odd installation issue on ThinkServer TS430

pashadee

Active Member
Jan 11, 2014
34
0
26
Hi guys,

Not really sure if anyone has run in to this but after the 4th day of banging my head against the same box, I thought I would reach out to you guys :)

I have 2 ThinkServer TS430 boxes, more or less the same with the exception of the BIOS, one runs the 3.X version and one runs the 2.X version. I am having the issue with the one that is on the 2.7 version (and no I can't upgrade to the 3.x because they are different chips, this model has 2 different types of BIOS).

Everything is working as expected, until the reboot after the install (I tried version 3.3 and 3.2 of proxmox). All I get once the bootloader passes to the OS (proxmox) just a blinking cursor in the top left side of the screen.

Things I have tried:
- create MBR partition on the disk prior to install, but the install recreates gpt anyway.
- install Ubuntu 12.04 desktop on the server (worked fine), but I did notice ubuntu used msdos partition structure.
- updated BIOS to the latest version for that model. (2.7)

Strange thing is, it installs and runs just fine on the other server (with the 3.x bios chip), the bios on that server detects the drive as legacy (csm), the server I am having issues with detects the drive as UEFI.
I have even tried dumping the drive from one server in to the other to perform install and then switch back, with exact same result which leads me to conclude that the issue is definitely in UEFI boot process.

One solution would to force the installer to use MBR instead of GPT type which the bios would then detect as legacy and work properly, but I'm not sure if that's an option I can pass the installer at boot.

Before someone suggests it, there is no way to force Legacy/CSM or to disable UEFI in the bios, it just scans the drive and if it finds EFI information on the drive it automatically sets it to that mode, if not then automatically goes to Legacy.

Proxmox 2.3 worked fine on both of these machines, having this issue since I decided to upgrade.

Thanks guys!
 

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