Installing to a USB external HDD

  • Hi All,


    I have an old N40L HP Microserver which is perfect for OMV, it has a modified bios and has 16 gb ram. It has an internal USB port for a pendrive and I want to hook here a WD element usb hdd. It does install ok, but when trying to boot after the installation, grub menu comes up and it fails to boot.


    I think it is just the grub config that isn't right, but I have no idea how to fix it.


    will try and create a screenshot at least a bit later.


    thanks in advance

  • This is weird.


    I can mount the filesystem on my mac and I can see the contents of /boot/grub


    Yet when I try to ls the folder in the grub menu, the folder is empty...


    I was under the impression that I could still boot the system and then repair grub when I only have this one disk attached to the system?


    :S?(

    • Offizieller Beitrag

    I'm confused at to what you are try to do, post 9 in that link tells you to hit ESC on the grub screen during boot that stops the countdown the press e there you can edit the mount the F10 to boot then all you need to do is run update-grub from the cli on the running system.


    I have an N54L running from a usb flash drive using the internal usb but I was able to install from a cd which negates grub boot issues.

  • There's no countdown... as soon as the post passes the pxe and press F10 and F12 menu, I am presented with the few lines of text and grub as it is on 1.jpg.


    ls command was typed in by me, but that's it, grub rescue> prompt and nothing else.


    I am re-trying now with another solution - just hooked a disk on the optical drive sata port and that seems to resolve the issue, wanted to learn my way around grub a little bit, now that (yet again) it tricked me.

    • Offizieller Beitrag

    I'm even more confused now, during the boot process you will get a blue screen with text below the blue screen shows the kernel/bootloader to be used if it doesn't get to that then there is something else wrong. Have you/can you try a usb flash drive from that internal usb?

  • I used balena etcher to write out the iso installer on a flash drive.


    I can use this to boot the installer and install OMV to the WD Element USB connected HDD. This disk is connected to the on-board USB plug.


    During the install /dev/sda is the WD element and /dev/sdb is the thumb drive.


    All installs fine, grub goes through fine too.


    Then when I reboot - I just get that error message, normal.mod not found and grub's prompt, that's it.


    No blue screen, no countdown.



    At the moment I have an internal sata disk instead. It is connected to the optical disk sata port and this way it boots fine.


    NAME MAJ:MIN RM SIZE RO TYPE MOUNTPOINT
    sda8:00 149.1G0 disk
    |-sda1 8:10 133.2G0 part /
    |-sda2 8:20 1K0 part
    `-sda5 8:5015.9G0 part [SWAP]

    • Offizieller Beitrag

    Could this be a BIOS boot order issue?

    • Offizieller Beitrag

    That's interesting, that would imply that the chip being used in the WD enclosure is the problem, perhaps it has no capability to boot from the chipset.


    I boot from a usb flash drive, I have 4 drives in the bays, a drive connected to the dvd port (ODD?) and a drive connected to the esata.

  • hm, that would be interesting... no, no boot order issue, since the drive is alone, and it does get to grub - at least to some extent.


    I do have another WD USB driver, an older passport one. I did boot off OSX from that ages ago, maybe will give that one a try.


    Also, there's a SATA-to-DUALUSB connector that I have for notebook HDDs, and that worked too, so the WD enclosure could indeed be the culprit.


    Thanks for helping me investigate guys, much appreciated!

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