Unable to install Proxmox VE on R730

[sarifac]

Hello,

I have been trying over the past two days to install Proxmox VE on a Dell PowerEdge R730. Below are the specs:

• 2.40GHz Intel Xeon E5-2620 v3 (x2)
• 64GB(8x8GB) ECC DDR4 1866MHz
• PERC H730 Mini
• 2x Intel DC S3610 (200GB), 1x Crucial MX500 (1TB)
• iDRAC Enterprise

Prior to attempting to install PVE, I updated the BIOS and iDRAC to their latest versions (2.16.0 and 2.83.83.83 respectively) and installed the disks. Was able to see the disks successfully show up in iDRAC. CPUs and RAM also show up successfully in iDRAC.

I then tried to install many different versions of Proxmox VE (8.0-2, 7.1-2, 7.4-1, and 6.4-1) using both a flashed USB (tried both Balena Etcher and RUFUS for this), and the iDRAC virtual media mount, but all to no avail. I also tried booting using UEFI and legacy BIOS. With UEFI, the installation hangs on "Loading initial ramdisk...". With legacy BIOS, the installation gets past "Loading initial ramdisk..." but then shows a black/blank screen. Adding nomodeset in the boot options for either case doesn't seem to change this behavior.

Additional things I've tried:

• Using both physical monitor (27" Dell UltraSharp connected via VGA) and iDRAC virtual console (HTML5) to view/attempt installation
• First installing Debian 11 and 12. This also isn't working (which makes me think there may be a larger issue going on?). Here, the installation hangs with an underscore stuck in the top lefthand corner
• Adding drm_kms_helper.edid_firmware=edid/1024x768.bin to the boot options
• Running memtest from the PVE installer (passed with no errors)

Would appreciate any help on this at all as I feel I've tried most sources/suggestions found online, but none are working.

 

[Maximiliano]

Hello, have you tried installing 8.0 with the new CLI (with, or without nomodeset enabled) installer? There are multiple posts with the same issue you could use a reference, see [1,2] for example.

[1] https://forum.proxmox.com/threads/e...option-system-cannot-boot.104377/#post-450093
[2] https://forum.proxmox.com/tags/initial-ramdisk/