"install grub to partitionless disk"

[Richard Ainz]

I was very happy to see that the Proxmox installer picked up my three drives (2 physical and one RAID(8 drives enclusore)) properly when choosing installation target on my production server. I did not select the RAID as target, but one of the physical drives that are not part of the RAID. All went well until the installation of the GRUB at the end.

"install grub to partitionless disk, embedding is not possible, but this is required for cross-disk install".

Ok, since I knew that there was a GPT partition on the RAID, I removed it and remade the RAID.
On the second attempt it threw the same error.

Now, are the partitions not supposed to be created at the beginning of the installation? How can grub then throw that?

I did some research and came up with this: https://wiki.archlinux.org/index.php/GRUB2#Install_to_Partition_or_Partitionless_Disk
So we need the "force"?

Good, how do I do that?

(I am a total n00b to everything linux and officially hate the prompt, I choose Proxmox because when the setup is done all I have to deal with is a pretty nice web interface)

 

[udo]

Hi,
this normaly only happens with an wrong disk-order in the bios.
You can try to adjust the diskorder, or remove all additional disks, so that the installer have only one drive left - after a successfully installation you can readd the other disks/raids...


Udo

 

[Richard Ainz]

I was wondering about doing an attempt to make a Debian net install and then put Proxmox on to that according to one of the guides...That would give me more control over the partioning and Grub.

 

[Richard Ainz]

Hi,
this normaly only happens with an wrong disk-order in the bios.
You can try to adjust the diskorder, or remove all additional disks, so that the installer have only one drive left - after a successfully installation you can readd the other disks/raids...


Udo

That would be real easy to accomplish, considering all disks are in hotswap trays. Should have thought of that. Thanks.

 

[Richard Ainz]

Fixed.

 

[Richard Ainz]

oops, now i cant find any other disk... only the "root" one with Proxmox installed, been at it for several hours trying to figure out how to list available drives (physical disks) mount them and partition them, but... sigh... this is just taking too much effort, should have gone the hyperv way..

1. The console window is to small, when I scroll up and down the info seems to jump pretty much at random, unable to resize without hacking Grub, no why would i want to hack grub for such a simple thing..? jeez...
2. parted -l only list 1 drive despite there being 9 more drives (I have a total of 10 HDD, 1 for Sys, one for Sys backup and 8 in a Raid for storage and VM's, thats 9TB total physical disk space.)
3. fdisk -l throws errors like no valid partition table, and finds one disk
4. pvscan shows the disk in use by proxmox (and available as storage)
5. mount -l shows all mounted volumes and a vague ref to /dev/sdb1 which should indicate that it find something on the second hdd's first partition but I have not created any partition on the second hdd, it should read ntfs since I left that drive unused and it contains some backups of the former OS I need.
6. du probably gives me more info, but it is unreadable du to issue 1 and is probably only listing disk usage (see i figured that one out... )
Now, since I do not get any workable disk info from above commands I am probably unable to use them to partition and format any disk they cant find. Right?

I think what happened is that when I removed the other drives for the installation of proxmox, it did not install the drivers needed for the raid and perhaps also for the backup disk (beats me it is a normal sata attached disk). Right now I am pretty much clueless and need to rethink this scenario. I actually thought I would be able to handle disk managemnt without having to read up on 400 pages of console commands documentation. Sorta.

 

[udo]

oops, now i cant find any other disk... only the "root" one with Proxmox installed, been at it for several hours trying to figure out how to list available drives (physical disks) mount them and partition them, but... sigh... this is just taking too much effort, should have gone the hyperv way..

1. The console window is to small, when I scroll up and down the info seems to jump pretty much at random, unable to resize without hacking Grub, no why would i want to hack grub for such a simple thing..? jeez...

Use an ssh-seesion to the server (putty on windows if you don't have an real OS)

2. parted -l only list 1 drive despite there being 9 more drives (I have a total of 10 HDD, 1 for Sys, one for Sys backup and 8 in a Raid for storage and VM's, thats 9TB total physical disk space.)

the hdds of an real raid controller are allways not visible for the OS - you see only the defined raid-volumes. If you see the single HDDs you have the disks defined as pass through (not likely) or your raid-controller aren't an raid controller - so called fake raids show the disks.
If you also don't see any raid-volume as disks, is perhaps the raid-driver not loadet? Which kind of raidcontroller do you have?

3. fdisk -l throws errors like no valid partition table, and finds one disk

thats normal, because all block-devices will show - also the dm-devices which are allways partitions.
Take a look with

dmsetup info

the minor-number is the number from dm-x
To see your sata/scsi-disks look here:

ls -lsa /dev/disk/by-id
# or 
dmesg | grep disk

4. pvscan shows the disk in use by proxmox (and available as storage)
5. mount -l shows all mounted volumes and a vague ref to /dev/sdb1 which should indicate that it find something on the second hdd's first partition but I have not created any partition on the second hdd, it should read ntfs since I left that drive unused and it contains some backups of the former OS I need.

that shows that your disk-order in the bios is wrong - otherways your systemdisk is sda and not sdb (I assume that /boot is on sdb1 in your case).

6. du probably gives me more info, but it is unreadable du to issue 1 and is probably only listing disk usage (see i figured that one out... )
Now, since I do not get any workable disk info from above commands I am probably unable to use them to partition and format any disk they cant find. Right?

I think what happened is that when I removed the other drives for the installation of proxmox, it did not install the drivers needed for the raid and perhaps also for the backup disk (beats me it is a normal sata attached disk). Right now I am pretty much clueless and need to rethink this scenario. I actually thought I would be able to handle disk managemnt without having to read up on 400 pages of console commands documentation. Sorta.

No,
the additional harddisks must be allways assembled "by hand". The installer take only the first one.
What happens with add. disks can't know by the system - this must done by you.

You have many choices: create additional local filesystems, expand the logical volume pve-data, create an lvm-storage... depends on your usages.
See here (at the bottom) http://pve.proxmox.com/wiki/Storage_Model

There are also many threads in the forum about additional disks - even in the pve1.x-forum.

Udo