Arch Linux

jerryk

Member

Registered: 2022-01-20

Posts: 3

Dell T110ii

Hello,

   I'm trying to install Arch Linux on a Dell PowerEdge T110 ii server PC.  No joy:  The screen comes up asking what I want to run.  I choose "Installation Medium: - or somesuch - there's also a "copy to RAM" option.  Whichever one I choose, it displays a few lines of Linux bootup stuff... then a blank screen.

   Has anybody installed Arch on one of these machines?  Is there a driver that needs to be added? Some boot parameter to type in? 

                 - jerryk

loqs

Member

Registered: 2014-03-06

Posts: 17,362

Re: Dell T110ii

What release of the ISO are you using?  If you wrote it to a USB thumb drive have you used it successfully on a different system?  Does Disabling modesetting have any effect?

Zod

Member

From: Hoosiertucky

Registered: 2019-03-10

Posts: 630

Re: Dell T110ii

Are you spamming the "any" key throughout the boot process?

jerryk

Member

Registered: 2022-01-20

Posts: 3

Re: Dell T110ii

It's the latest release.  I just downloaded it today.   It's a thumb drive.  I just tried it successfully on a Beelink GT-R Pro mini PC.   At least to the point of seeing the #root prompt.
   Right now, that server PC has an Ubuntu.  In the past, I ran Slackware on it.

loqs

Member

Registered: 2014-03-06

Posts: 17,362

Re: Dell T110ii

Does Disabling modesetting have any effect?

See Kernel parameters to set the option.  If that fails try iommu=soft and if that fails acpi=off
Edit:
What is the kernel version of the Ubuntu installation and what kernel module is used by the GPU?

Last edited by loqs (2022-01-21 00:58:08)

jerryk

Member

Registered: 2022-01-20

Posts: 3

Re: Dell T110ii

OK, adding the nomodeset option worked.  The installation environment came up.

Still haven't managed to actually install Arch though.  Not so it would boot up.  At first, I installed it onto a 2-Tb NVME drive.  I had forgotten about the whole "old motherboards can't boot on NVME" thing.
No driver in the BIOS.  OK, I retried with a SATA SSD.  One big partition.  Whups, that didn't work either. 

I installed grub, and when I tried to configure it, it complained that the /boot didn't look like an EFI partition.  OK...that sort of makes sense.  Whatever device /boot is on, has to be accessible to the grub executable - with no OS loaded yet.  So /boot reasonably should be its own partition.  OK, I reformatted /dev/sda with a small EFI partition and the rest - ext4.

Fixed that... Now it boots into grub.  But not into Linux.  Just the grub rescue screen.  Sigh.  Rebooted off the USB stick, said "pacman -S linux linux-firmware" again.  OK, now /boot looks like good stuff...reboot - back to the grub rescue screen .

As you might guess, I'm totally new to Arch.  But not to Linux.  I started playing with Linux at kernel version 0.94, and have been using it seriously for maybe 25 years.  Mostly for server tasks.  Webserver,
Samba, email server, that sort of thing.   I have been using Slackware, and am interested in upgrading to something a little more modern - mainly because Slackware doesn't have a package manager, and I'm tired of compiling everything.

My understanding is that Arch is "simple" the same way as Slackware - with all the config files in the usual places, and not all shifted and messed up to do GUI tools.

loqs

Member

Registered: 2014-03-06

Posts: 17,362

Re: Dell T110ii

Did you follow GRUB#Generated_grub.cfg?  If so please post the contents of /boot/grub/grub.cfg /etc/default/grub and the output of

# parted -l
# blkid