[SOLVED] Installing on HP Proliant DL380 G5 Fails with grub error

[casparsmit]

Hi All,

I'm trying to revive some old hardware to have some use. I was hoping to create a small test Proxmox 4.2 Ceph cluster with 4 HP Proliant DL380 G5 Servers.

Installing Proxmox 4.2 finishes without errors HOWEVER booting fails (in fact loading grub fails)

It says:

error: unknown filesystem
Entering rescue mode...
grub rescue>

Cannot list ANY of the partitions shown by ls. (Everytime the same error: unknown filesystem)

When i connect the same bootdisk to another (Supermicro) server it boots fine!

So there has to be something in the HP servers to prevent booting. Maybe these servers don't support EFI partitions or something? Is there any known workaround to get this to work or are these servers just too old?

Thanks in advance,
Caspar

 

[dcsapak]

you could try to install debian and proxmox on top, see https://pve.proxmox.com/wiki/Install_Proxmox_VE_on_Debian_Jessie

 

[coppola_f]

Caspar,

in my knowledge,
Gen 5 of HP Proliant....
has no builtin support for UEFI....
(i'm not sure if they've added in latest bios versions)

i've successfully installed 3.x versions on these machines (DL380 g5!) in the past but never tested it using v.4.x

i may mind you've already applied on machines all firmware updates from hp website prior to try installation of proxmox....
correctly configured the boot priority and raid using ORCA or SmartStart cd/dvd tools

let me know if you find a solution...

regards,

francesco

 

[casparsmit]

Caspar,

in my knowledge,
Gen 5 of HP Proliant....
has no builtin support for UEFI....
(i'm not sure if they've added in latest bios versions)

i've successfully installed 3.x versions on these machines (DL380 g5!) in the past but never tested it using v.4.x

i may mind you've already applied on machines all firmware updates from hp website prior to try installation of proxmox....
correctly configured the boot priority and raid using ORCA or SmartStart cd/dvd tools

let me know if you find a solution...

regards,

francesco

Thank you both for the replies.

I managed to pinpoint the problem to the USB Controller and or firmware.
I installed proxmox into a USB Harddisk of 256GB, I guess the HP's have a limit of some sort to be able to boot USB devices beyond a certain size (I've read 4GB will boot, but 8GB and 16GB have mixed succesrates). When I hooked the harddisk to the SAS controller it worked. Allthough i'm now not certain about the UEFI stuff because now i've created an installation with an MBR based bootdisk.

 

[coppola_f]

Caspar,

i'm happy you solved the issue...
tech forums was born just for this,
help users to share knowledge and find solutions!!

regards,
francesco