can install, but reboot brings me to a flashing cursor

J

jeebustrain

Renowned Member
Jan 14, 2010
24
0
66
St Louis
Hi,

after some initial headaches, I've managed to get Proxmox installed (I think) on my system using "debug acpi=off" at the boot prompt. I can get through the wizard without issue. When it finishes up, it goes back to the terminal, where I type "exit" to reboot. But after POST, the whole system appears to get stuck (I'm assuming at Grub or whatever you are using). It's just a blank screen w/ a flashing cursor.

I've tried various different install methods, taking advice from different posts on this forum (using ps2 keyboard, apic=off, etc...) and nothing seems to get me anywhere after the reboot.

Here's my system:
AMD Athlon II x4
Asus M4A785-M motherboard
- Onboard video (Radeon HD 4200)
- Onboard nic (realtek 8112 L)
8GB ram
2x Intel Pro1000 nics
1x 500GB Western Digital boot disk (where I installed Proxmox)
1x 1TB Western Digital HDD (temporary storage for some items)
3x 2TB Western Digital disk (ultimately will be dedicated disk for a file server guest)

I see lots of posts around the blank install screen issues, but I can't find anything around this.
 
jeebustrain said:
Hi,

after some initial headaches, I've managed to get Proxmox installed (I think) on my system using "debug acpi=off" at the boot prompt. I can get through the wizard without issue. When it finishes up, it goes back to the terminal, where I type "exit" to reboot. But after POST, the whole system appears to get stuck (I'm assuming at Grub or whatever you are using). It's just a blank screen w/ a flashing cursor.

I've tried various different install methods, taking advice from different posts on this forum (using ps2 keyboard, apic=off, etc...) and nothing seems to get me anywhere after the reboot.

Here's my system:
AMD Athlon II x4
Asus M4A785-M motherboard
- Onboard video (Radeon HD 4200)
- Onboard nic (realtek 8112 L)
8GB ram
2x Intel Pro1000 nics
1x 500GB Western Digital boot disk (where I installed Proxmox)
1x 1TB Western Digital HDD (temporary storage for some items)
3x 2TB Western Digital disk (ultimately will be dedicated disk for a file server guest)

I see lots of posts around the blank install screen issues, but I can't find anything around this.
Click to expand...

try the new 2.6.18 based installer (1.5 final). see http://pve.proxmox.com/wiki/Downloads
 
Last edited:
awesome... Can't wait to try it tonight.

I've had this "box" sitting here at my house for almost a month with the intention of it being both a virtualized lab and a house for all of the little one-stop machines that I'd like to utilize at home. I've taken stabs at Xen (CentOS), Citrix's Xenserver, ESXi, and even Hyper-V Server and every one of them has had a major pain point for me, mainly around disk/network performance and hardware compatibility. I discovered Proxmox completely by accident a few days ago and from everything I've read about it, it sounds like a really promising product.
 
ok - I just tried it... I didn't have to enter any boot parameters and things loaded fine. Install went smooth (no errors that I could see) and it was able to reboot itself.

But when it came back up, same problem. Black screen w/ a flashing cursor. It's like grub just doesn't want to load.
 
I think I just realized what the problem is... I think it's putting grub on the wrong drive. I'm choosing my designated boot drive as the default device in the bios, but the Proxmox setup is putting it somewhere else. I'm going to disconnect all of my other drives temporarily to see if I have any better luck on the install.
 
success - I disconnected all my extra drives and pulled out the 2 extra nics (to make sure the onboard became eth0 by default). I'm now up and things are humming along nicely. Now all I need to do is figure out how to get a kvm machine to boot from a specific ISO in a library that I created (I moved a bunch over).
 
jeebustrain said:
I think I just realized what the problem is... I think it's putting grub on the wrong drive. I'm choosing my designated boot drive as the default device in the bios, but the Proxmox setup is putting it somewhere else. I'm going to disconnect all of my other drives temporarily to see if I have any better luck on the install.
Click to expand...

Yes I had the very same problem.
Install from ISO went fine, but it simply would not boot (not even into grub).

My host has a HDD/SDD on IDE (used for proxmox host (/boot and /root)
and three SATA drives (for storage).

Proxmox is numbering them as follows:
sda: sata-disk 1
sdb: sata-disk 2
sdc: sata-disk 3
sdd: ide hdd

...as said, install went fine, but would boot into a black screen only.

I then tried the install method via debian (lenny).
Debian lenny is numbering the disks as follows:
sda: sata-disk 1
sdb: sata-disk 2
sdc: sata-disk 3
hda: ide hdd

...and installs on hda as expected and can boot fine.

After installing PVE from the repos, upon reboot, the /boot
filesystem cannot be found (fsck-ed).
In order to enbable PVE kernel to start I had to change the
drive letter from /dev/hda1 to /dev/sdd1 in /etc/fstab

I now got PVE running, but booting a non PVE (debian generic)
kernel would require to change /etc/fstab again :(

Any comments on why the disk numbering scheme is
different on PVE than that from lenny?

TIA,
P3X-749
 
yea - everything is working now - the install went off without a hitch after I removed my other drives. Also, I realized I had the sata bus in IDE mode. I changed it to AHCI and all of my drives went from /dev/hdx to /dev/sdx, based on the port number. That allowed me to allocate the drives on ports 5 and 6 to be directly mapped to my openfiler guest (before that, it wouldn't see them).


As far as why this happened, I have no idea.
 
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