How to boot to Proxmox

[deranjer]

Just downloaded 5.1 on USB and installed via UEFI, (ZFS Raid 0 with 4 disks) and proxmox will not boot at all. I can boot via recovery on UEFI just fine, can run update-grub:

Found linux image: /boot/vmlinuz-4.13.4-1-pve
Found initrd image: /boot/initrd.img-4.13.4-1-pve
Found memtest86+ image: /ROOT/pve-1@/boot/memtest86+.bin
Found memtest86+ multiboot image: /ROOT/pve-1@/boot/memtest86+_multiboot.bin
Adding boot menu entry for EFI firmware configuration
done

I can't run a grub-install:

root@derajnet:~# grub-install /dev/sda
Installing for x86_64-efi platform.
grub-install: error: cannot find EFI directory.

So I then installed it via legacy (ZFS Raid 0 with 4 disks) and that does not boot at all either, and ALSO cannot boot via USB recovery.

Does anyone know how to correctly install Proxmox so that it can boot from ZFS?

 

[fireon]

Installed it many times with ZFS (legacy) never had a problem with. Do you get an errormessage at screen? What hardware to you use?

 

[deranjer]

I have 4x2TB WD Red HDD, a MSI Z77A-GD65 mobo, a intel Core i5 or low end i7? 32 Gig of memory. I was running proxmox on it before, but after a catastrophic disk failure I'm starting fresh, although I had LVM on last time.

EDIT: Oh and on boot it just can't find a boot device.

 

[Lky]

You should boot the right disk of your raid0 setup. I don't know how proxmox handle this, but only one disk needs the efi partition.

So the grub-install/boot only works on that disk! You should change your boot order to boot from the disk with your efi partition.

Btw. ZFS Raid0 over 4 disks? Are you sure?

 

[deranjer]

I've tried all 4 disks multiple times... none of them boot on legacy or uefi. Whats wrong with ZFS Raid0? I have everything backed up don't care if I lose anything.

 

[Lky]

Whats wrong with ZFS Raid0? I have everything backed up don't care if I lose anything.

I was running proxmox on it before, but after a catastrophic disk failure I'm starting fresh.

Mhmm okay strange, as i said before i don't really know what zfs raid0 install does. Which partitions it creates (on which disks) and where it installs grub.

Maybe a sgdisk -p output of all disks would be helpfull.

It looks like on both grub was not installed correctly, because the recovery boot does found the zfs raid0 with the boot partition and boots it. Does grub support installed on a zfs raid0? It looks so wrong for me. Could you try a raid5 or raid1, just for testing?

https://forum.proxmox.com/threads/p...ing-by-installer-grub-boot-zfs-problem.21683/
https://pve.proxmox.com/wiki/ZFS:_Tips_and_Tricks#Grub_boot_ZFS_problem

 

[deranjer]

Installing with Raid10 gets the same blinking cursor on boot can't find grub (and can't boot from USB in recovery), installing with Raidz-1 boots into Grub Recovery directly.

 

[fireon]

Strange... have you connected to a real SATA/SAS Controller? Not HW-Raid? Does a normal LVM-Installation working?

 

[fabian]

the PVE installer does not support ZFS+UEFI.

for legacy boot, it will install grub to all disks for raid0/raid1/raidz, and to the first pair of disks for raid10. note that your BIOS needs to present all the disks as bootable that are need to import the pool, otherwise grub will just dump you to the rescue shell. if it does, you can easily verifiy whether it is because of missing devices, just run "ls" and check the number and content of disks..

you can also try booting the "rescue mode" of the installer cd, it should detect your pool and boot, and you can then try to fix whatever is wrong from within a boot PVE environment (that won't help with BIOS issues, but it can help to debug grub/disk/ZFS issues)

 

[deranjer]

Strange... have you connected to a real SATA/SAS Controller? Not HW-Raid? Does a normal LVM-Installation working?

Not using HW RAID, directly plugged into the mobo on the SATA ports

[    1.222516] ata1: SATA link up 6.0 Gbps (SStatus 133 SControl 300)
[    1.222540] ata7: SATA link down (SStatus 0 SControl 300)
[    1.222600] ata2: SATA link up 6.0 Gbps (SStatus 133 SControl 300)
[    1.622458] ata8: SATA link down (SStatus 0 SControl 300)

the PVE installer does not support ZFS+UEFI.

for legacy boot, it will install grub to all disks for raid0/raid1/raidz, and to the first pair of disks for raid10. note that your BIOS needs to present all the disks as bootable that are need to import the pool, otherwise grub will just dump you to the rescue shell. if it does, you can easily verifiy whether it is because of missing devices, just run "ls" and check the number and content of disks..

you can also try booting the "rescue mode" of the installer cd, it should detect your pool and boot, and you can then try to fix whatever is wrong from within a boot PVE environment (that won't help with BIOS issues, but it can help to debug grub/disk/ZFS issues)

Thats the thing, the Rescue Mode does not detect the pool when using Legacy boot (after installing from Legacy USB). It does when I use UEFI install and then use UEFI Recovery mode, that will boot it, but can't fix grub for that. All 4 drives do show up in the boot menu, but all 4 of them just return a blinking cursor when testing.

I did unplug 2 of my SATA drives as well as my DVD drive and was finally able to get it to boot on Raid0 (and RAID 1), but doesn't seem to like all 4 drives. Not a big deal, 2 drives should be enough for me. The reason I want them to stripe is that my FSYNCS is very low (not sure why). This is my results with 2 striped drives:

CPU BOGOMIPS:      55998.88
REGEX/SECOND:      2189742
HD SIZE:           3535.01 GB (rpool/ROOT/pve-1)
FSYNCS/SECOND:     137.83
DNS EXT:           74.12 ms
DNS INT:           95.64 ms (duckdns.org)