HP Proliant Microserver Gen8 G1610T - boot from SSD ODD

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Hi , 

I've recently installed ubuntu 1404 server on this machine to an SSD in the optical drive bay.  All work correctly until I start adding  SATA drives in the main body of the server -> then the server seems to try and boot from these SATA discs instead. 

I've used ACHI not RAID. 

I've looked around the bios and cannot figure out how to get the machine to boot from the SSD in the ODD bay - there doesn't seem to be any options to change boot order. 

Im gussing I need to boot from the micro sd card or a usb stick. Which then tells the server to load ubuntu on the SSD. Please can anyone tell me where I could find some instructions for this setup?

Also , unrelated - are any of the software packages in

http://downloads.linux.hpe.com/SDR/repo/mcp/pool/non-free/

worth using in ubuntu?  

Thanks in advance. 

[Jam31st]

Hi ads_uk,

Seems as though boot controller only allows boot from bay 5 if no drives are in swappable bays.

Only workaround i have for booting from an SSD in ODD is to swap the bay 1 and bay 5 (ODD) over. However, this method will mean Bay 1 (now bay5) will be difficult to swap out.

Not an ideal solution, but the only one I managed to find!

Hope this helps someone out!

EDIT: Instructions to do this can be found

http://homeservershow.com/forums/index.php?/topic/8963-rearranging-sata-ports-to-boot-ssd-in-odd-void/

Thanks to Shonk for the info!

[disulfiram]

Hi there!

I don't know if you already solved your problem but here is what I found. It says here that you could install GRUB on a flash drive during Ubuntu installation and this should solve the problem. Unfortunately for an unknown reason this did not work for me (at this point I have a guess). So I tried this but the install command resulted in an error about embedding or something like that.

Did some research and it turned out the flash drive needs to be MBR (I guess this was the reason it failed during install). I tried formatting the USB in Ubuntu using these instructions but I failed and I assume it was my own fault. I ended up doing it with elevated command prompt in Windows using DISKPART and Windows 7 install disk.

All of this solved the problem for me. Hope this post is useful to someone out there.

[sergey_t]

Hi,
My solution for booting from ODD bay in AHCI mode:
1) Install any microSD card. Actually I used old SanDisk 2Gb
2) Install SSD using SATA cable to ODD and power converter.
3) Install Ubuntu LTS server with / and swap mounted on SSD, /boot and GRUB on SD.
Please note if you will add some drives later probably swap will not mount because ODD drive change it dev path.

Still trying to install FreeBSD with same approach. But Ubuntu installed from first attempt.

[Kvark]

Just tune up mine :) 

to run SSD is actually simple: on system boot press F10, get to system configuration options for RAID, create an array and include only new SSD drive into it, make it bootable. After that - create another array and add your HDDs. 

[Jimmy Vance]

It actually depends on what OS you run as the RAID driver is only available for specific versions of Windows, RHEL, and SLES. 

[karlG1]

Ran into this topic while upgrading the controller and proc for my Gen8 still using it with pleasure. Proper piece of hardware for the price. 

For anyone that runs into this issue. It does always boot from USB. Directly on the motherboard there is an additional USB port. I stuck a usb key in there. Added the SSD drive on the optical drive SATA connector. And installed Ubuntu with the /boot on the USB stick. Been running it like this for years now. Never had an issue.