Proliant ML110 Gen7 - trouble booting into OMV

[silk186]

I'm trying to install OMV 4 only a from a USB onto a second USB connected to the internal USB port on the motherboard. I started up the computer, it detected and booted off the installation USB drive and installed to the internal USB drive. In unplugged the installation drive and rebooted but it won't boot into OMV.

How can I get it to boot into OMV?

[Kashyap02]

Have you verified the boot order in the POST. Is it set to USB?

[silk186]

At boot, I pressed F11 for boot menu, option 9 and set the standard boot order (IPL) to USB KeyDrive (C: )

I don't know if it is still trying to boot from the RAID controller.

[Kashyap02]

Change the Boot order from BIOS --> Standard boot order (IPL) --> Set to USB

If you are not using the RAID controller, you can try disabling it from BIOS.

[NeilPr]

Hi there, I'm wondering if you ever got a resolution to this - I have the exact same problem on an HP ML310, and was hoping to bypass it by changing platform to an ML110... my hopes are now low...

What I have determined so far - I get the exact same 'grub rescue' prompt as your screenshots. It is NOT a case of telling the mobo or BIOS where to find a boot drive, I can substitute a Debian Live or Unbuntu USB drive and it boots perfectly. 

I can also use the same OMV 'runtime' USB drive and have it work fine in a laptop. No other bootable USB drive shows the same difficulty booting, it is just the ML310/OMV combo which doesn't want to play.

I have tried to dig into the GRUB boot process and it seems logical, but I'm struggling to know how I can gain troubkeshooting info from the grub rescue prompt to assist. The only things I seem to be able to use are 'LS' and SET.

LS shows only one drive, (hd0) and one partition (hd0,msdos1)

When I check environment variables they all appear to point to the appropriate drive/partition. I can do an LS of (hd0,msdos1)/boot/grub and the files shown look sensible, in particular there is a grub.cfg file present.

The grub rescue environment does not seem to support 'CAT' however so I can't see the contents as grub sees them.

Any attempts to manually continue the boot process as per other interweb suggestions result in that " Attempt to read or write outside of disk 'hd0' " error message.

I get a similar situation if I install onto a sata SSD and boot from that, however if I install onto one of the storage drives it works fine - but I don't want to waste a whole drive bay just for booting.

My feeling is it is to do with the HP built-in drive array, but I have yet to prove it by completely disabling the 4-bay RAID controller as an experiment.

Also I installed OMV onto an SD card and tried that in the internal SD port, similar except that it did boot properly into grub prompt, not grub rescue. No other drives present at that time.

Anyone go any good ideas?

Neil

[Dan-M]

Hi @NeilPr @Kashyap02 

I am fighting the simillar problem with trying to boot OMV from SD card on DL360 G7

Have you had a chance to overcome the issue?

[NeilPr]

Hi there, @Dan-M 

Sadly no, but I did manage to work around it OK.

The workaround was to install VMWare ESXi on the server first, and run OMV as a virtual server.

It works just fine, with the proviso that mapping drives with existing backups gets quite complex, or if you want to create a RAID volume or similar. Basically ESXi wants to own all of your drives if it can. 

It is possible to map existing filesystems but harder than it needs to be.

So apologies, no easy answer I can give you but I found the VMWare route acceptable. I did a lot of research and it seems much better people than me gave up on it too. ESXi had no issues at all installing on SD card and booting from it on HP server, and seems to add no noticable overhead. Free as well...