And dd worked but gave me a stick that wont UEFI boot.
Honestly id prefer to do UEFI. I also could not find the legacy option in my MB BIOS, so either they named it something goofy, I missed it or its not there.
Ill check out the BIOS again, but I feel silly. Ive been at this for an hour and havent gotten the installer to start lol. Ive tried 4-5 different methods of creating the install media.
I know its likely me, but it cant really be this hard to create UEFI botable media…
Maybe ill try another USB drive, but ive used this one for dozens of various installs and never had an issue.
Secure boot <> UEFI. I already checked that secure boot was turned off. I have the manual from ASRocks site, gonna comb through it see what they called it.
In the mean time I may try another stick. I noticed Etched created a stick that appeared to only be ~900MB and gave me a ton of errors and odd behavior trying to reformat it and get it back to full capacity. A few other methods resulted in the same thing.
I use rufus at work to make UEFI bootable CentOS sticks all the time. Maybe ill just dig up my external DVD drive and burn the ISO to a disc
Yea I have seen it a thousand times. Wana know what ASRock decided it should be called?
CSM
The cherry on top, the stylized it as a folder in the UEFI to take you into another menu with the options and explanation of what it actually is. So unless you selected it youd never know…
Never in my life have I seen such a stupid name for that feature. Ive seen legacy mode, compatibility mode, BIOS mode, etc. If I had the free time ASRock would be getting hate mail from me.
It was enabled, disabling it gave me UEFI boot option from the DVD drive i connected, installer running good now.
My guess, and I am gonna test it now, is my USB stick was fine using rufus. Booted as UEFI and the “CSM” being enabled conflicted with it.
Rufus boot still fails. Gonna use DVD and move ahead to the next step. Thanks for the help, posting here and hearing back is likely the only thing that kept me from tossing the server out the window.
Now I am unable to reclaim the SSD space and install to it. I get the dialog to reclaim space, select delete all and hit the reclaim space button. It kicks me back to the Installation summary. Under the Destination option it says briefly “failed to save storage configuration” then changes to “no disk selected”.
Going back in the SSD is selected but still showing some absurdly small amount of free space.
Ive installed CentOS literally thousands of times on various hardware. Ive never seen this happen with reclaiming space (re: it not being able to). It seems to be unable to delete the previous partitions left by Windows Server. I didnt use any disk encryption, raid, etc prior.
Im scratching my head here. Havent found anything on Google about this either.
Wondering if I need to do something like boot gparted, wipe all the drives/partitions then run the installer? Any other ideas?
I had tried that and got an unknown error and the installer crashes.
I used gparted to delete all partitions on all the disks.
Automatic partitions during installation doesnt prompt to reclaim space any more but still kicks me back to the installation summary as it had before, failing to save disk config then telling me to select a drive.
I guess the next step might be disconnecting all the drives except the SSD?
You may try again with selecting the ssd and creating new partitions automatically like in the screenshots but disconnecting is also possible so it should choose the right disk itself.
When you say second try, were you able to immediately retry? For me the entire installer crashes and the system reboots. Should I just let it reboot and try again?
No, I had to reboot. I am using a VM for testing so rebooting is really quick but yes, you may give it a try…
Or halt, disconnect drives and start again, maybe more efficient.
I have a sneaky feeling it has to do with the “order” of the drives. My SSD is on mSATA which is linked to like SATA_4/5, So it ends up being sde instead of sda. Removing all other drives may resolve this unless the DVD drive takes sda
I do have the SSD in the installer set to be the boot drive however.
I do see a message/error stating under installation destination initially:
“Error checking storage configuration”
After clicking destination I have a yellow banner at the bottom with the same error and a details link, details read:
“Failed to find a suitable stage1 device”.
Im gonna start googling those messages hopefully this is easy to overcome.
If everything else fails, another option is to download a CentOS minimal ISO, create the bootable usb and start the installation. If it gives no problem reclaiming space, (I don’t know) maybe it’s something in the kickstart scripts used on Nethserver ISO.
If it works, you can install nethserver following the manual to install on CentOS
Its gotta be something odd with how space is being claimed/disks are being handled.
I unplugged all drives but the SSD. Its now sda. Initially there is no error under destination. Choosing to auto partition gave a dialog to reclaim space…thats odd right. Suddenly the drive thinks it has an LVM and xfs partition etc. It should still be blank.
Selecting manual partition produces the same result as before, crashes.
I am gonna try gparted 1 more time, then try Nethserver install with just the SSD hooked up. If that fails minimal CentOS install to try and reclaim space etc.
I must be going crazy. Gparted showed it had no partitions. I decided, hey, ill just do the whole thing 1 ext4 partition. Applied it no issues.
Boot Nethserver install again, and its showing reclaim space saying the drive has ~3 partitions, LVM, xfs and something else. I cant even wrap my head around why it would think this.
