unable to install PVE 8.4.x on Lenovo ThinkSystem P3 Ultra with 2 nvram drives

[alexandervw]

Hi there,
i am really at the end of my knowledge, because i cannot install PVE on our Lenovo ThinkSystem. I can boot from USB, and start the installation, then wheather choosing one as "ext4" or both onboard nvram drives as target, or using both as "zfsRAID1", at the end of the installation, an error, see screenshot occurs.
There is no hardware raid card installed, and i have not created any raid within the UEFI BIOS.
Many thanks for help
Alexander

 

[Winger216]

Hey there — totally feel your pain. I ran into the exact “installer finishes then dies at the bootloader step” on a Lenovo ThinkStation. The short version: the Proxmox installer writes the system just fine, but the Lenovo firmware refuses to create a UEFI NVRAM boot entry, so it bails at the very end. The good news is you can still finish the job manually in a couple minutes and boot reliably.

I wrote up everything (with screenshots and commands). It’s in Chinese, but Google Translate/GPT may handle it well. You can find a list of command there that may solve your problem. Basically just go into rescue mode on the installed machine, use grub-install with --no-nvram, and copy efi file to /EFI/BOOT/BOOTX64.EFI to make it the fallback option the system uses. Wish you good luck!

 

[alexandervw]

@Winger216: Many thanks for getting back to me on this. I will give it a try.