danb35
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- Joined
- Aug 16, 2011
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I just picked up a used HPE Proliant Microserver Gen8 to use as a second TrueNAS server at my parents' home--Time Capsule replacement for them, replication target for me. Seems like a nice little piece of kit, compact, has remote management, four drive bays, and reasonably economical for a Xeon-based server. Problem is that I can't get it to boot from USB. Like, at all. It won't boot the TrueNAS installer from a USB stick (and that same stick will boot other computers into the installer), whether in an external USB2 port, an external USB3 port, or the internal USB2 port. It will boot the ISO through the iLO virtual media feature, so I installed TrueNAS onto a USB SSD that way--which worked fine, but was very slow (almost an hour and a half to install). But the system won't boot from the USB SSD either; it says "Non-System disk or disk error"--same as it does for a USB flash drive.
I tried resetting the BIOS to defaults, no change.
I'd like to get this working. Other options are:
I tried resetting the BIOS to defaults, no change.
I'd like to get this working. Other options are:
- Put a standard SATA SSD into one of the drive bays. In the short term, I only plan on using two spinners, so I'd have two bays free--but that would mean I wouldn't be able to add a second pair later on without making adjustments. I'm installing TN right now this way to test, but I expect this to work (but then, I expected the USB boot to work--but I was able to boot a different OS from the SSD, so I expect this will be fine).
- Connect a SSD to the SATA port for the optical drive, and follow the instructions here (https://www.admfactory.com/hp-microserver-gen8-boot-from-ssd-install-on-odd-bay/) to boot from it. This doesn't take a drive bay, but it's turning on the onboard hardware RAID controller--bad juju for TrueNAS. I wouldn't mind it too much for just the boot pool, but it seems like an all-or-nothing situation.