New to Proxmox, can't boot except using installer and ZFS Rescue Boot

[confused]

I am new to Proxmox and am trying to get version 5.0 to work on an Acer One RL85 with two additional 1 TB dives installed, so counting the original that means there are three 1 TB drives total. I got Proxmox to install, and had it format the drives using zfs raid-z1 with the default options, using the three hard drives, but the problem now is it will not boot. It appears the computer can't find anything to boot from until I insert the installation USB memory stick. If it can see that, and the install menu comes up, I can use the Rescue Boot option and then it will boot into Proxmox and run it with no apparent problem. Obviously, I'd like for it to boot from the hard drives.

Going back to Proxmox 4.4 made no difference at all. When the computer attempts to reboot, a screen comes up that says "Reboot and Select Proper Boot Device or Insert Boot Media in Selected Boot Device and Press a Key", unless the original install USB stick is connected.

If I tell it not to use ZFS and just do a normal install on a single drive, then it boots fine with no problems. But then I have no redundancy.

I suppose I could just leave the installation USB stick connected but I would still have to select the Rescue Boot option at each reboot, which would be quite inconvenient since I wanted to use this as a "headless" system (no keyboard, mouse or display connected).

Can anyone explain in a clear, non-technical manner why this refuses to boot when using ZFS, and what I can do about it? Or, is there any way to configure the USB stick so that when it boots from that, it automatically selects the Rescue Boot option without waiting for keyboard input? I have searched on everything I can think of relating to this and have found nothing at all helpful.

 

[confused]

Well, I figured out the answer to my last question. On the memory stick there is a file called /boot/grub/grub.cfg and I added two lines to it, just above the first line that starts with the word "menuentry" I added two lines:

default=2
timeout=0

So as long as I leave that memory stick in it will boot, but I wish there were a way to do it without using the memory stick.

 

[HPdDG8GgFUGknF]

As stated in proxmox wiki on ZFS on Linux page:

It is not possible to use ZFS as root file system with UEFI boot.

You are most likely booting over UEFI so normal instalation works fine but the one on ZFS does not.

I actually have similar issue, i cant get one of my machines to boot in legacy mode and i have to boot through Rescue Boot every time.
How did you manage to mount the iso to edit grub cfg file? I can only mount it as read-only filesystem. It would make things much easier for me to change default boot option too.

 

[confused]

Thanks for the response. If it's on a memory stick, take that stick to another machine that can recognize the filesystem (for example if it's ext3, take it to a Ubuntu desktop machine). When you plug it in, the OS should recognize and mount it, and you should see a couple of new volumes in the file picker sidebar, and two new windows should pop up. One should be the boot partition. On Ubuntu these will be mounted under /media/username/...

You should be able to edit it there. If it gives you a permissions problem then use sudo in front of your editor name. I use Midnight Commander so in a terminal window or ssh session I just do sudo mc, then find the file, then press F4 to edit it. After you are through you can go back to the file picker to eject the USB stick's volumes.

Note that if the boot partition is FAT32, as is often the case (I don't know for sure about Proxmox), you can do this on just about any desktop computer. In fact, it may be easier in Windows since windows doesn't care about Linux permissions, but I have no Windows machines to test that theory. If the machine doesn't know about ext4 then it will only show the FAT32 partition, which would be the boot partition. I never really looked to see what the format of the boot partition was on the ISO stick, though.

This is how I've done it, because I'm not a Linux genius and don't care to spend hours of my life trying to solve yet another stupid Linux puzzle. I suppose it might be possible to mess around in /etc/fstab and make the volume writeable, but then again one wrong character and you could make your machine unbootable. It's much easier to just do this on a desktop or laptop computer running a full desktop OS, if you have one available.

#4

 

[confused]

Just a followup for anyone else reading this. Apparently this board moderates the posts of new users such as myself, so most to the conversation between the OP and myself was carried on in private. However one thing we figured out is that it appears the boot partition in at least some versions of Proxmox appears to be in HFS+ format, which is the native format for Apple Macs. In such a case you may not be able to write to it from a Windows or Linux machine, at least not without installing some additional software. As it happens my desktop system runs OS X, so I didn't notice this, and had just assumed the boot partition was fat32.

There is a whole discussion about reading and writing HFS+ in Linux here:
https://askubuntu.com/questions/332...d-external-hdd-in-ubuntu-without-access-to-os
Try searching on "How to read and write to HFS+ in Linux" for more results. I do not know if similar software exists for Windows systems.

Keep in mind that you don't necessarily need to use the same installer iso that was used to create the system in order to boot it. The OP said he was able to take a normal Arch Linux ISO, and edit Grub there. He said he copied the grub menuentry from the Proxmox usb, and pasted it to the grub config on arch-usb, which would let him save properly, and afterwards was able to boot from that. I personally would not know how to do that but since I do have an OS X box, I was able to edit the file directly on the original install usb.

Hope that helps someone.

 

[batijuank]

Same problem here, I'm using an acer h81h3-am with 2 hdd 1TB each I have tried using ZFS raid 0 and 1 to no avail. I have to use rescue boot option every time I reboot the system. Have any of you figure out how to solve this?