Installation aborted

[Steijn van Essen]

Hello community,

As an unexperienced Linux user and absolute newbie to ProxMox I failed installing ProxMox VE 1.8 right from the start.

I built myself a brand new brick for virtualizing my home network and getting rid of all my old hardware.
The new brick is rather impressive and should serve me for a lot of years to come: i7-980X CPU on Asus Sabertooth X58 mobo w 24 GB of DDR3 (3-channel) memory.

Since I had no CD/DVD player yet installed I created a bootable USB key from the Proxmox install ISO. Installation ended with "\nInstallation aborted" message at some point.
Having seen quite some warnings and the message cdrom not found I waited for my external (USB attached) CD/DVD player to arrive. Howver installation failed at the same point (I think).

One of the first messages is "unknown video mode 317, press ENTER to see video modes available, SPACE to continue ...".
Somewhat later follows "pci0000:07:00.0: BAR 6: address space collision on of device [0xfbef0000 - 0xfbefffff]" and "pci0000:07:01.0: BAR 6: address space collision on of device [0xfbec0000 - 0xfbedffff]".

The following lines follow:
mounting proc filesystem
mounting sys filesystem
cmdline: vga=791 ... BOOT_IMAGE=linux26
loading filesystem drivers:
ACPI: I/O resource 0000:00:1f.3 [0x1000 - 0x101f] conflicts w ACPI region SMRG [0x1000 - 0x100f]
<skipping some lines>
... found ProxMox cdrom
Starting ProxMox installation
installing additional hardware drivers
starting ... udevd ... done
waiting for /dev to be fully populated ... Error: Driver 'pcspkr' is already registered, aborting ...
done
Detecting network settings ... done
\nInstallation aborted - unable to continue (type EXIT or CTRL-D to reboot)

root@proxmox:/#

My goals with the new server are not just hardware consolidation, but also gaining some serious experience with virtualization, Linux and IPv6 networking. I was told that ProxMox was a serious small budget alternative to VMware and the like, so I don't want to give up right away ;-)

Now, why does my install fail?
# Is my hardware too new or impressive (i7 6 core, 12 threads, 24 GB of memory w another 60 GB of SSD as paging/swapping space)?
# Could it be my 12 year old video card?
=> sorry, no onboard video
# Could it be any of my two onboard RAID controllers (Intel Matrix Storage Technology 6 x SATA2 and Marvell 88SE9128 2 x SATA3)?
# Do I need to plug in a network cable before install starts?
=> I noted from other posts that I should get a "NET: Registered protocol family 10" message which I don't get.
# Do I need to toy around with cheatcodes I read about on this forum (f.e. debug vga=normal, acpi=off, apic=off,lapic=... etc)?
And if I were to toy around w cheatcodes: how/where do I do that?!
=> FYI, I still have my bootable USB key which might not be the problem after all and the contents of which I might be able to adjust very easily.

Could anybody perhaps give this "rather newbie" a little push in the right direction?

Thanking you in advance for your time,

 

[dietmar]

Seems your video card is not VESA2.0 compatible - please can you try a newer one?

 

[tom]

or go this way: http://pve.proxmox.com/wiki/Install_Proxmox_VE_on_Debian_Lenny

 

[Steijn van Essen]

Gentlemen,

Thank you for your swift reactions. I'll follow both suggested tracks and will be back with the results later.

 

[Steijn van Essen]

Dear community,

I’m back with some results I want to share with you:

@Dietmar, you might be right, and the old card will definitely not support my current monitor resolution, but up till now I was able to work on my ‘case’ w/o any problem (my 1600 x 1200 monitor - I’m not a HD(TV) addict, you know - is a perfect match for ‘good old’ 1024 x 768 res). And while still wrestling with ProxMox there’s no plans to run X Windows in the short term (I love them good old Telnet screens ;-).

@Tom, when I fully grasped the consequences of your suggestion I felt a bit left in the cold at first. Such a complicated assignment for a newbie! But it sure helped me a lot: Starting to know some new things about Debian (or Linux for that matter) and getting a grasp on my install problem.

So here’s some findings that might interest other community members as well, and some questions in the bottom:

· So far Debian seems to have no problem with Intel 6-core (though I might be still running single core in this phase) or 24 GB of real memory;
· Debian Installer probably has a problem w USB attached CDROM as boot device: after configuring the network part it errors on ‘cannot find CDROM’. Borrowing my internal SATA CD player from my other machine tackles this problem for now;
· Debian seems not to recognize my onboard Marvell 88SE9128 2 x SATA3 (RAID 0/1) ctlr. I was lucky to hook up my internal CD player to the – also onboard – Intel 6 x SATA2, where it worked right away, to make at least some progress and find some answers;
· Mapping a lot of SATA HDDs to Linux device names was also a challenge. But in the end I learned that my SATA ports 1 – 6 are referred to in the BIOS as PM, PS, SM, SS, 3M, 4M. You might not be surprised me thinking this referred to the last two characters of some HDD serial number at first, before I tried hooking up my CD player to different positions. The above codes probably intend to help you match the ports with the old EIDE setup (primary/secondary master/slave, 3^rd/4^th master). And reading a lot on forums I learned that Linux has two ways of assigning names to SATA HDD partitions: The old scheme ‘(hd#,n)’, with #,n = 0,1,2 and up, still used by f.e. the GRUB boot loader; and the new scheme ‘sd%n’, with % = a,b,c and up, n = 1,2,3 and up. The catch – of course – being that Linux will not skip HDD numbers (as does my BIOS) when a disk fails or is swapped with a CD player. Or put in other words: there is no one-to-one match from BIOS ports to Linux HDD names, because Linux doesn’t count the unused (skipped) SATA ports. But good to know that tools like fdisk do give some info on SATA port numbers;
· After drawing the conclusion that the Debian Installer didn’t see my SDD on which it was supposed to install the OS (i.e. Debian and lateron ProxMox) because of the Marvell ctlr, I hooked my SATA3 SSD up to an Intel SATA2 ctlr port and yes(!) there it was;
· At the end of the installation, when asked if I wanted to install GRUB, I agreed. But reboot failed with ‘Error 17: Cannot mount selected partition’. Reading some more on GRUB and the /boot/grub/device.map and /boot/grub/menu.lst I was able to make some progress: I used the Debian Installer CD’s ‘Rescue’ option to move the boot loader from the MBR of hd0 to the MBR of hd4 (my SSD), get into a shell and use fdisk to make the first partition bootable (by setting the bootflag). Though maybe ‘bootable = on’ is not necessary if you configure GRUB with ‘root (hd4,0)’ to load my fresh Debian installation.

So where am I now?

Left with three questions for now:

1) GRUB still fails to load my OS with the ‘Error 17’ message. But now I’ve been able to trace some other message issued before this, saying ‘Filesystem type unknown, partition type 0x27’. The hex value 0x27 translates to fsID = 39 in my opinion, a number I didn’t see when I used fdisk for inspection (I only saw fsID = 82 (swap) and 83 (Ext3) as far as I remember.
Did anyone of you see this message before?! Could it be related to an old Windows 7 install on one of my HDDs? Does anyone know how to tackle this?

2) Is my onboard Marvell 88SE9128 2 x SATA3 ctlr supported by Debian? Or is there anything I can do to help it getting supported?

3) I consider buying the Adaptec AAR-1430SA ctlr. I spent quite some time to find an affordable extra RAID controller for my big, new server, because I currently have far more bays than SATA ports (even when I get the Marvell to work). The Adaptec was the best match looking at the money. But I already read that its not a very good controller (see http://www.brentnorris.net/blog/archives/158), with Adaptec’s HostRAID technology standing for nothing more than DIY (do-it-yourself). To be more precise: Adaptec lets the (Windows, SuSE or RedHat) drivers do the work, that is, offloads the RAID processing to your CPU. Still, the cheap buy attracts me: I already have six SATA ports w RAID support and Debian can do software RAID for me (which should be no problem with my 6-core/12 thread CPU). And it is suggested to be supported by Debian (see http://www.doctort.org/adam/nerd-notes/adaptec-1430sa-on-debian-linux-etch.html). But could anybody confirm to me that this card is supported? Or give me an affordable, supported, alternative offering at least 4 x SATA2?

Awaiting your most appreciated reaction(s),

 

[Steijn van Essen]

Hello community,

I just want to give you a round up of the progress I made with solving my problem and share with you some answers on the above questions I posed to you:

• My ‘cdrom not found’ problem occurred both when trying a complete ProxMox install and a ProxMox-on-top-of-Lenny install. I was not able to install from an USB key with an ISO on it, nor from a USB attached CD player. This can probably be solved if you’re a guru, but I came by this by borrowing the SATA CD drive from my workstation.
• Even with the SATA CD drive in place, the complete ProxMox install kept failing with ‘Installation aborted’. Since it appeared to me that my iron did not have ‘the most standard configuration’, I decided to follow the trail Tom suggested, i.e. do a ProxMox-on-top-of-Lenny install. But from the last entries in this post you can read that I also encountered serious problems getting Debian installed.
• I got my Intel Matrix Storage Technology 6 x SATA2 and Marvell 88SE9128 2 x SATA3 RAID controllers to work with Debian Lenny by configuring them (in BIOS) both in AHCI mode instead of IDE mode. Lenny now marked the drives attached to the Intel Matrix as ‘sdx’ (SCSI/SATA) rather than ‘hdx’ (IDE) hard disks and it spontaneously discovered the drives attached to the Marvell controller (as ‘sdx’) which where not found at all in IDE mode. So, better set modern controllers to modern AHCI mode instead of old IDE (though I expected to have better changes with good old IDE mode). I didn’t try any RAID setup at this point, though. Also interesting to see that BIOS changes port names from IDE to AHCI mode: PM, PS, SM, SS, 3M, 4M changed into P1 – P6, which is a far easier to understand scheme.
• I wanted to install ProxMox on my SSD and also use SSD for swapping. Of course I attached the SSD to the Marvell rather than the Intel Matrix. The next problem to solve was with GRUB: how to install Debian to and boot it from ‘/dev/sdg’ rather than ‘/dev/sda’. After some experimenting I was able to complete this task as follows: don’t accept the Debian installer default to put GRUB on the MBR of the first drive (‘sda’). My ‘first drive is supposed to be part of a hot swappable RAID setup in the near future. Rather, instruct Debian installer to put in on the MBR of my seventh drive, which is configured in BIOS as preferred hard disk to boot from. The only strange thing about this is that I had to configure ‘root (hd0,0)’ in /boot/grub/menu.lst to make it work. Here’s my full entry for Debian installed on the first partition on my SSD:
  

  title       Debian GNU/Linux ...
  root        (hd0,0)
  kernel      /boot/vmlinuz-x.y.z  root=/dev/sdg1 ro quiet
  initrd      /boot/initrd.img-x.y.z

  
  Configuring ‘root (hd6,0)’ would be more logical in my opinion in relation to ‘root=/dev/sdg1’.
• The ‘Filesystem type unknown, partition type 0x27’ error I got from GRUB, by the way, had to do with the unlogical GRUB device numbering just described. After a while I found that fstype 0x27 belonged to an Acer hidden rescue partition for an OEM Windows 7 installation which was still on one of the other hard disks. With this understanding I was able to make sense of GRUB’s device numbering scheme.
• Is the Adaptec AAR-1430SA RAID controller supported by Debian (and ProxMox)? I’m not sure yet, but reading other posts I think it will work. Didn’t buy it yet, though.

To complete this round up, I want you to know that I succeeded in running Debian Lenny on my iron in the end (some six weeks ago). And the specs are impressive. I recall: i7-980X 6-core, hyperthreading CPU on Asus Sabertooth X58 mobo w 24 GB of DDR3 (3-channel) memory, 6 x 500 GB WD HDD for (RAID) data storage + 1 x OCZ Vertex 60 GB SSD for ProxMox install, VM’s and swapping. And some more hardware to follow.

I also want you to know that yesterday I was able to complete the basic installation of ProxMox on top of Debian and this iron. And PVE manager proudly reports all hardware, including 12 CPU virtual cores. You can find a round up on my six week’s struggle to finalize this second step in my 2nd post [thread=6717]ProxMox web interface not running[/thread].

= P O S T - C L O S E D =

 

[fozzieb]

Did you get the Adaptec card in the end? did it work?

I have one and was going to get a couple drives to build a server box and use proxmox to host the vm's. not sure if card is compatible (does not work with esxi)

Cheers.

 

[Steijn van Essen]

Hi Fozzieb,

I didn't buy the Adaptec card in the end (or so far), because I changed focus from expanding my exisitng server to building a second one. Reason being that when I read about ProxMox clustering I really wanted to experiment with that as well. Building the second server took me quite some time and resulted in scaling down my plans for the first server (which was already a bit expensive). As a result of scaling down the need for a third SATA controller vanished. The already planned extra disks (and hot swap bays) are now in the second server (w the same mobo and stuff but with i7 quadcore and only 12 GB of memory).

Since I was able to get my two onboard controllers to work I am still optimistic about getting the Adaptec to work. But again, no plans (and need) for buying for now.

 

[fozzieb]

Thank you for the update. I have built my test rig and unfortunately the Adaptec card does not work with Proxmox. The only options i can see are to either use the Hyper-V platform in Server 2008 R2 or to buy another Raid controller. At the moment I am just running Win 7 on it with a Raid 10 array until i think of the best way forward.

 

[tom]

The Adaptec RAID 1430SA is a host raid adapter, means this is not a hardware raid controller, not supported.

​

Its cheap but its not the card you should use.

 

[Steijn van Essen]

Fozzieb,

I am sorry to hear that you didn't get the card running so far. Maybe you could try changing some settings in the (on card) BIOS as I did with my Marvell?!
Like Tom says, it's not a hardware RAID adapter. But when I read about this, I figured I for its interesting price I could do Debian software RAID (since I've lots of CPU cycles to spend). But - of course - to make this work you should first be able to "see" the controller and drivers attached to it.

On my quest last summer I found some leads that suggest the card will or might work with Debian, so maybe not give up right now.
Just for the record, talking about 2008 R2: way back in time I had a succesful implementation with W2K Server software RAID in the past. But that was with a good old Adaptec SCSI controller. So yes, there might be better support with Windows for your card.

I am sorry that this is all I can do for you (as a rather newby myself) ...