Proxmox Install on 4Kn drives with a Legacy BIOS

[hiatthe]

Hey all,

I'm in a bit of a jam here because I've got 4Kn drives attached to an HBA, and my HP Proliant Server only supports Legacy BIOS.

So when I go to create my ZFS pool to install Proxmox to, I get told that I can't boot from 4Kn in Legacy mode.

Am I screwed? Or is there a way around this?

I've looked at installing Debian 12, and then installing Proxmox on top of that, however.. I need to be able to create ZFS pools in order to have something to install to. Which I don't believe Debian 12 can do in the installer correct?

Thanks in advance!

 

[Stoiko Ivanov]

I don't think that you can boot from 4Kn drives in legacy mode at all - so out of curiosity - can you even install plain debian (without ZFS) on those drives and boot from them?

Else - currently I only see the option of installing on top of debian - there is a guide in the openZFS wiki (currently only find the version for bullseye - but the procedure should work with bookworm as well):
https://openzfs.github.io/openzfs-docs/Getting Started/Debian/Debian Bullseye Root on ZFS.html

In general it might be easiest to get other drives - alternatively you can put a smaller disk (or 2 for mirroring) in the system, install PVE on those and then add the 4kn drives for storage and just not boot from them.

 

[hiatthe]

I don't think that you can boot from 4Kn drives in legacy mode at all - so out of curiosity - can you even install plain debian (without ZFS) on those drives and boot from them?

Else - currently I only see the option of installing on top of debian - there is a guide in the openZFS wiki (currently only find the version for bullseye - but the procedure should work with bookworm as well):
https://openzfs.github.io/openzfs-docs/Getting Started/Debian/Debian Bullseye Root on ZFS.html

In general it might be easiest to get other drives - alternatively you can put a smaller disk (or 2 for mirroring) in the system, install PVE on those and then add the 4kn drives for storage and just not boot from them.

Thank you for your response!

That's a good point in that 4kn drives just might not be bootable at all in Legacy mode. After some further research I've seen some things to confirm that.

Can proxmox be installed to a USB drive? I've only got 8 bays in my server, and I'd like to make use of all 8 of them for storage.

 

[Stoiko Ivanov]

Can proxmox be installed to a USB drive? I've only got 8 bays in my server, and I'd like to make use of all 8 of them for storage.

It's not recommended - Proxmox VE does quite a bit of logging and other small writes to the system disk - and this usually wears out most USB-drives very fast.

Some users do run such configurations - you'll certainly find threads with their experiences in this forum.

But I'd really suggest to change the layout and have sensible system-disks!

 

[aljaxus]

I would like to point out - for anyone reading this and thinking they would give running PVE with USB-backed storage a try - don't.

You would need USB thumb drives that have good constant write speeds - which are very expensive. Normal USB thumb drives will just die on you. Speaking from experience, we've tried running a node with such setup and it did not pay off.

If you really do not have any other option than USB look into getting two good-enough USB to SATA adapters and throw two cheap sata SSDs in there, mirror them and setup alerting for when one of those drives (or adapters) fails.