Dell Optiplex 755 won't boot after openSUSE 11.3 RAID Install

I’ve been away from here for a while, having been forced by work issue to move to an iMac for most of my work, so my openSUSE usage has been primarily on the side. However, I finally got a new home office server, and I’m trying to setup it up with RAID and openSUSE. The system is a Dell Optiplex 755 SMT, with two Samsung SATA drives (2TB each).

I followed the instructions here: Implementing Software Raid on openSUSE 11.2 | Spirit of Change

Basically, I setup both drives with /boot, swap, and / partitions, formatted with the RAID auto-detect FS, then created the RAID partitions over the three pairs of physical partitions.

However, apparently, I forgot to tell the bootloader to install to /boot. At any rate, it booted in the standard pre-config reboot, and aborted the boot complaining about filesystem corruption and asking me to check the filesystem with fsck manually. But the little monitor I was using didn’t allow me to see what partition it was complaining about. So I gave up and rebooted, thinking I’d reinstall or try something else.

That’s where the real trouble started. Now when I boot the machine, I get to the BIOS startup screen (big Dell logo), and then the screen goes black with two lines:

“Initializing Intel(R) Boot Agent GE v1.2.50
PXE 2.1 Build 086 (WfM 2.0)”

Then it hangs. I’ve tried hitting F2 (setup) and F12 (boot menu) during the BIOS startup, but the result is always the same, it boots to the above message, and hangs.

Is there anything I can do about this? I can’t get the machine to boot to setup or a CD. What do I do now?

I’ve been away from here for a while, having been forced by work issue to move to an iMac for most of my work, so my openSUSE usage has been primarily on the side. However, I finally got a new home office server, and I’m trying to setup it up with RAID and openSUSE. The system is a Dell Optiplex 755 SMT, with two Samsung SATA drives (2TB each).

I followed the instructions here: Implementing Software Raid on openSUSE 11.2 | Spirit of Change

Basically, I setup both drives with /boot, swap, and / partitions, formatted with the RAID auto-detect FS, then created the RAID partitions over the three pairs of physical partitions.

However, apparently, I forgot to tell the bootloader to install to /boot. At any rate, it booted in the standard pre-config reboot, and aborted the boot complaining about filesystem corruption and asking me to check the filesystem with fsck manually. But the little monitor I was using didn’t allow me to see what partition it was complaining about. So I gave up and rebooted, thinking I’d reinstall or try something else.

That’s where the real trouble started. Now when I boot the machine, I get to the BIOS startup screen (big Dell logo), and then the screen goes black with two lines:

“Initializing Intel(R) Boot Agent GE v1.2.50
PXE 2.1 Build 086 (WfM 2.0)”

Then it hangs. I’ve tried hitting F2 (setup) and F12 (boot menu) during the BIOS startup, but the result is always the same, it boots to the above message, and hangs.

Is there anything I can do about this? I can’t get the machine to boot to setup or a CD. What do I do now?
So, I have never used this setup before, but just making guesses. PXE 2.1 Build 086 (WfM 2.0) indicates you may not be trying to directly boot from the hard drives. I suggest you remove the hard drives and/or controller and see if you can then get into the BIOS setup. Check your boot order and disk interface to make sure it is not set for AHCI, but rather ATA. This may require redoing the entire disk partitioning. Can we assume you are using mirroring and not trying to end up with a 4 TB hard drive, right? 2 TB is the top end without switching disk partitioning to something not supported by openSUSE, as far as I know.

Thank You,

Yeas, you are right - I’m doing a mirroring setup (RAID 1). But I think you may have hit the nail on the head with your suggestion about the disk interface. When I set it up for RAID I selected the “RAID only” (or similar) option - there were two other RAID options, one for AHCI and one for ATA. That may be where I went wrong. I hope so!

Thanks for the reply!

<EDIT>Looks like you were right! Machine booted right up w/o HDDs, and I set the RAID mode to “RAID auto-detect ATA” - it booted right up and I was able to load the openSUSE installation disc. Thanks so much!</EDIT>

Yeas, you are right - I’m doing a mirroring setup (RAID 1). But I think you may have hit the nail on the head with your suggestion about the disk interface. When I set it up for RAID I selected the “RAID only” (or similar) option - there were two other RAID options, one for AHCI and one for ATA. That may be where I went wrong. I hope so!

Thanks for the reply!

<EDIT>Looks like you were right! Machine booted right up w/o HDDs, and I set the RAID mode to “RAID auto-detect ATA” - it booted right up and I was able to load the openSUSE installation disc. Thanks so much!</EDIT>
Hey that is great news. I hope that you get openSUSE loaded as you need. Please let us know if you need any other help.

Thank You,

One more thing - in the Installation Summary, I can see the default bootloader options are “Boot from MBR (enabled)” and “Boot from /boot (disabled)”. Is that optimal? Should I enable boot from /boot?

I prefer to not install the Grub Boot Loader into the MBR (Master Boot Record), but make the MBR generic boot loader and install grub into the root “/” openSUSE partition. You can ONLY boot from partitions 1, 2, 3 or 4. So, you need to keep that in mind. It is actually possible to load the grub boot loader into a Logical Partition, which is not intuative and would not actually be the root openSUSE partition, so this is the one exception. I always keep a separate /home partition, the root partition “/” and the SWAP partition. So, three are the only ones required. But, you need more if you want to boot Windows and I highly recommend you load Windows first in such a case.

Thank You,

No Windows here - a straight openSUSE server install. I’m only doing a /boot, swap and / partition on this machine. So I would install GRUB into /boot in my case, correct?

No Windows here - a straight openSUSE server install. I’m only doing a /boot, swap and / partition on this machine. So I would install GRUB into /boot in my case, correct?
You can load it into either one, just make sure it is marked as active for booting. When you do not load Grub into the MBR, make sure you elect to load Generic Boot code into the MBR. New disks, may have nothing there at all, though a disk that had Windows will have something there.

Thank You,

Hmm… I just left mine at the default (Boot from MBR), but after reboot I get Grub Error 17 (Cannot mount selected partition). Did I miss something?

Hmm… I just left mine at the default (Boot from MBR), but after reboot I get Grub Error 17 (Cannot mount selected partition). Did I miss something?
My suggestion in such a case is to do one of two things:

  1. Download and boot from a Live CD and determine if you can partition and mount your RAID partitions.
  2. Download and Try the GParted Disk, which allows you to do both with ease.

Option one tells you if the Kernel version that comes with openSUSE is going to work. Option 2, tells you if it is going to work with any version of Linux. Following is a link about GParted.

Re-Install Grub Quickly with Parted Magic

Normally, Grub Error 17would mean a messed up partition table and worth trying over again. If you can partition and mount it with either boot disk, you should be able to use openSUSE. I must assume you can select the RAID partition in your BIOS as the boot partition.

Thank You,

I’ve tried reinstalling a few times - I’m convinced I’m not configuring GRUB properly - it is never able to find the /boot partition. I’ve tried both the “Boot from MBR” and “Boot from /boot” options from the installer screen - neither of those work. I’ve looked around in the advanced bootloader settings, but I’m not sure what to look for. I posted to this thread (OpenSuse 11.3 Installation with RAID1 on two disks) to see if I can get some more info there.

So, you did not say if booting from a live CD seemed to work OK. Can you boot from a live CD and do any partitioning with it? Perhaps it is just Grub that can not deal with the RAID partition. Sometimes, you just need a conventional hard drive, internal or USB, to kick start openSUSE into booting.

Thank You,

Also depends on the type of RAID. If it is BIOS assisted (FAKE) RAID it can be a problem It should be no problem for software RAID or real hardware RAID.

How can I tell if I’m using “fake” RAID? I have RAID enabled in the BIOS (no hardware RAID controller) - is that “fake”? Should I turn that option off and try again?

zak89, did you try booting from a Live CD to see if your RAID drive can be seen and or partitioned from a Live CD?

Thank You,

Sounds like you have FAKE RAID It would be easier to do software RAID but that will not work if you are dual booting to Windows. Real Hardware RAID is the best option if you dual boot. You might check if there are drivers for the chip set on the mother board. Some chip sets seem to work other don’t.

Hmm… I’m not installing Windows, so I’ll do whatever I need to do to get RAID working here. In my BIOS I have four options for “SATA Operation”: RAID Autodetect AHCI, RAID Autodetect ATA, RAID on, and Legacy. Which of these would be the most appropriate in my case?

RE James - I’ll try a LiveCD tomorrow and see what I can do.

  1. RAID Autodetect AHCI,
  2. RAID Autodetect ATA,
  3. RAID on, and
  4. Legacy

So can we assume you were using option 1 at first, then changed to option 2, right? Now, you have options 3 and 4 left. I guess I would try option 3 and then go to 4 if all else fails. If you can’t get it to boot, you have only lost time so far and I would try them all looking for a solution.

Thank You,

Actually, I switched from 1. to 3. (RAID on) before I tried this in the first place. I’ve since switched to 2., but that isn’t working either. There doesn’t seem to be a “No RAID” option, so if this is fake RAID, it looks like I’m stuck with it. I’ll give legacy a try.