Arch Linux

herzmeister

Member

From: Germany

Registered: 2015-06-23

Posts: 12

HP ProLiant Gen8 corrupted boot drive

Hello,

I recently set up an HP ProLiant Gen8 as a simple home/file server.

It has 4 bays for 3.5″ HDDs, but because my 4 TB drives are not bootable, I instead boot from an additional 2.5″ SSD (that I built into it instead of an optical drive), and onto which I installed Arch Linux (pretty standard setup with GRUB, plus LUKS on LVM full system encryption).

Because by default the BIOS of this machine would not find this SSD to be able to boot from it, it seemed the only solution for this (according to entries in various forums) was to enable the machine's RAID controller and to put the SSD into its own RAID 0 Array (using HP's "Intelligent Provisioning" tool built into the machine's ROM). I had also put all my other HDDs into their own RAID 0 Array for the time being.

This whole setup worked well for a while without any issues. However, after a reboot today, the machine suddenly would not find the SSD drive to boot from anymore. Entering the "Intelligent Provisioning" tool it told me that *all* my drives (which are all quite new I might add) suddenly "have failed" and that "all data" is "lost", and that I can't re-enable them easily until these "issues" are "fixed".

I arch-chrooted into the system from an Arch installer USB stick, and all data on all drives naturally was still there.

After backing up the most important stuff I found no other way than to rebuild the RAID Arrays in the "Intelligent Provisioning" tool despite the warning that "all data" will be lost.

And indeed the machine finds the SSD again and boots from it, but the Arch Linux boot process now gets stuck at the "starting version 230" message. The file system seems to be intact, all files are there and can be read, fsck returns "clean". But there is something that the RAID controller must have overwritten. Re-running mkinitcpio and rebuilding grub-mkconfig did not help. I'll be fine with a complete re-format and reinstall though I guess.

But then the same issue will likely reappear, so I'd like to know if anyone experienced similar things in a similar setup, and what the root cause might be, if there are probably missing drivers I'd have to install, etc.

Many thanks!

Last edited by herzmeister (2016-06-04 17:58:37)

R00KIE

Forum Fellow

From: Between a computer and a chair

Registered: 2008-09-14

Posts: 4,734

Re: HP ProLiant Gen8 corrupted boot drive

The only thing I can think of is removing the 'quiet' option from your kernel line and see if you can get an approximate location of where things are hanging.

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R00KIE
Tm90aGluZyB0byBzZWUgaGVyZSwgbW92ZSBhbG9uZy4K

herzmeister

Member

From: Germany

Registered: 2015-06-23

Posts: 12

Re: HP ProLiant Gen8 corrupted boot drive

Yes of course, it was the netconf hook which I removed for now and which seems to be a separate issue. Still I have no clue what could have caused the RAID controller to consider all my drives "failed".