Trouble USB Installing To HP Proliant Microserver Gen8

[bonfiredog]

Hello there, I'm hoping you can help me; I'm tearing my hair out at the moment.

I bought and HP Proliant Microserver Gen8 for the express purpose of installing Amahi onto it. This model does not have an optical drive, so I am following the well-document, if officially unsupported, instructions for installing via USB. I burned Fedora to my USB stick as instructed, plugged it in, and booted up the server. I've been struggling a bit with navigating the HP's proprietary software and its BIOS, but I finally managed to get it to boot one-time from USB (it kept trying to use the NIC to boot, and found nothing to boot from). I've tried not to touch any other settings.

I got to the Fedora Live build just fine, and installed Fedora onto my hard drive as instructed, creating root password and admin user. When the installation had completed successfully, I rebooted, with the stick still in.

However, now the machine will ONLY boot to the USB stick, and the Fedora Live build, and not the local install on my hard drive. I have tried installing to two of my three hard drives (my 4TB one and one of two 500GB ones), but I CANNOT get it to just boot to hard drive. I've changed the boot order in the BIOS setup to boot to hard drive first, but it doesn't work. I just don't know what I am doing wrong. Somebody said to change it to AHCI mode, which did mean that the BIOS recognised and displayed all drives, but does not boot from them.

If you can help me here, I'd appreciate it. It seems that Fedora is successfully installed on one (or indeed two, now) of my hard drives, but I cannot get the machine to default boot to either of them.

Thanks so much.

[bigfoot65]

Have you seen the Installing HDA on HP Proliant Gen8 Microserver guidance in the Amahi wiki?

[bonfiredog]

Hello,

Yes, thank you, I did look through that. However, the actual installation instructions are just a link to the ExpressCD installation instructions, and as I do not have a optical drive installed, I am instead following the USB install instructions.

[bigfoot65]

Ok. Some users have had success by booting the Express CD from a USB drive as well. You can find many free utilities that will flash an ISO image to a USB drive.

There is another option as well called Easy2Boot. I have tested it with great results on many Linux distros.
http://www.easy2boot.com/

I would recommend you try those options first. There are not many HP Proliant users in the Amahi community that I recall, so you may not get much help.

[bonfiredog]

Thank you for your advice, I seem to have solved the problem now.

It seems that, from the BIOS setup, the boot controller needs to be set to AHCI. Once this happens, you can leave it to default boot, and it should boot Fedora build. This is what it has done with me, and I have been able to install Amahi onto my Fedora build.

Now, to work out why the install is not working on my control panel... something to do with DHCP, no doubt.

[bigfoot65]

Good to hear you got things sorted out. Key part is that the HDA works. The control panel will catch up if everything is good.