Unable to install - upgrade Dell R620

[Loxion]

Hi All

I have a Dell R620 that I have been using as a proxmox node for about a month without any issues. it was a 4 bay server so I wanted to upgrade it to 8 bay, so did some research and identified what appeared to be a solution.

As such, I have replaced the backplane with an 8 bay and installed a PERC H310 PCI-e RAID controller in order to manage the now 8 ports. In Setup I can see all the drives, RAID controller all appears OK (no issues or errors reported), I can create virtual drives no problem so the hardware appears to be functioning OK.

However, when trying to do a fresh install of Proxmox it keeps hanging at 3% (creating LVs) and if I leave it long enough (hours) it will eventually fail with the following error:

"fileparse(): need a valid pathname at /usr/share/perl5/Proxmox/Sys/Block.pm line 50."

Can anyone point me in the right direction to assist with fault finding, I am not an expert by any means

I am installing on an SSD that was working fine with Proxmox previously in that server. I have also deleted the partition and reformatted the drive so hopefully any old install shouldnt be an issue.

I was using a SSD as primary install, a 1Tb SATA for VM data and that was working fine before.

My assumption is that it has to be related to the RAID Controller or Backplane, but I am not sure what to look for as it it all appears to be working (at the hardware level) and I don't understand the error.

Any help, direction or info greatly recieved.

Thanks

 

[Ela@Blach]

I have an r620 in a production system at work. I assume the raid card you were using previously was what came in it? Dells can be very particular about this, When I build this server, we replaced the raid card with an LSI card and flashed its firmware to "IT" mode to run zfs as our filesystem. We had issues with the 620 refusing to boot to that device (dont remember if it would install or even start installing tbh, it was a while ago) and we had to do a special workaround with the card to "appear" as a dell certified card or something to get it to work.. Anyway all this to say, Try installing any other operating system, see if it works. If not, they there is a good chance it may be the raid card. Try installing to a usb drive or something, if that works, try to access the raid from within a booted environment. If it DOES work, then you probably have an issue with the dell not wanting to boot from that raid card. If it DOES NOT, then you probably have an issue with the raid card and/or the drives.

Hope you get it figured out!

 

[Loxion]

Cheers.

I picked up the RAID card from Ebay and it was only cheap so always a bit of a risk there, but it was only 10GBP. I am certainly starting to suspect the RAID card, its showing as an LSI card on boot so was hoping it would be OK but will probably look at flashing anyway.

I managed to get Proxmox installed yesterday but it took about 4 hours to complete the install. Then when I booted into it, it took a good 1-2 hours to do the initial updates from the no-sub repo.

Ill keep digging, but worst case I can pick up an 'out the box' 8 bay R620 for about 100GBP so might look at that and just transfer the 128Gb RAM and HDDs I have already. Its all part of the learning curve.

 

[Loxion]

So flashed the H310 today and first attempted install on the SSD failed so doing additional checks on the H310 config etc.

 

[Ela@Blach]

Assuming you are using IT mode, maybe this can help? This is a different card than what I used. https://fohdeesha.com/docs/H310.html

I used an H200E, personally.

 

[Loxion]

Assuming you are using IT mode, maybe this can help? This is a different card than what I used. https://fohdeesha.com/docs/H310.html

I used an H200E, personally.

Thanks, that is the site/guide I used to flash the card.

Had a couple more failed installs yesterday, then took out all the drives apart from the SSD. Formatted the SSD via the RAID config and that failed to install (couldn't create LVM). Bit more digging around, put the non-raid storage drive back in and formattted that which took about 3 hours to complete. Then reinstalled using the latest ISO on the SSD and it worked perfectly.

Ran the updates without any issues, then shutdown, re-installed the other 6 drives which were all detected and are now setup as Raidz through Proxmox.

Got there in the end, it worked after formatting the SATA drive, didn't work after just formatting the SSD. Might make sense to someone more knowledgeable than me, but suspect it must have been looking at that drive as part of the install and as it had been previously used for vm storage there must have been something causing an issue until it was formatted.

 

[Ela@Blach]

Sounds like "one of those" weird issues. Glad you figured it out though.