Install Troubleshooting

From OSNEXUS Online Documentation Site
Jump to: navigation, search

Problem: Loading a Custom Built Driver During Install

With newly released hardware you may reach a phase of the installation where it is asking for you to load an external RAID driver. We recommend getting assistance from support@osnexus.com so that we can review your hardware and firmware levels and to ensure that QuantaStor contains the latest version of the driver for your hardware. OSNEXUS releases kernel updates for QuantaStor typically twice per year. Because newer drivers are required for some of the latest network and storage controllers QuantaStor augments the kernel with an additional driver package to broaden hardware support and to support the latest firmware from hardware manufacturers. As a point of reference, QuantaStor 5 includes a 4.15.0-36-generic Linux kernel.

Details of how to load a custom driver at Install time

At the phase where it asks to load a custom driver for your controller press 'ESC' and then choose 'Open Command Window' at the prompt. Next you'll need to mount and navigate to where your driver is located. For example:

cd /usbmedia/drivers/quantastor/
insmod driver.ko

At this point the driver is loaded an you should be able to now detect your hardware RAID mirror disk and install QuantaStor to it. To do this you'll first exit the command shell.

exit

And now you'll just need to choose 'Detect Disks' from the menu and the installation process will continue.

Problem: It won't boot to the Installation USB / DVD media

  • This is typically a BIOS configuration problem. You'll need to check the BIOS boot order to make sure that your CD or DVD drive is the first drive in the BIOS boot ordering. After that be sure to save your new BIOS configuration before rebooting. We have seen cases where the boot order is ignored and you will need to make the CD-ROM or USB CD-ROM the only boot device. In such cases you'll have to reconfigure the BIOS to boot from hard drive after the installation is complete.
  • This could also be caused by bad media. Try burning a new USB flash driver or DVD from the QuantaStor ISO file and check the surface of the disk to make sure there are no scratches.

Problem: Installation works fine but after I reboot the screen is black

  • One of the first things to check is your PCIe Boot Option ROM configuration. Most PCI cards from FC cards to NICs or RAID controllers all can be used to boot an OS. As such if you have multiple cards the motherboard can get confused strange things happen. To address this, look at your motherboard manual and disable the Option ROM on all of the PCIe ports except for the one containing the RAID controller that you're booting your QuantaStor system with.
  • This can also be caused by the 'boot' flag missing on your designated RAID unit for the QuantaStor OS. The installation can complete successfully even when this is not set correctly so you'll only see this problem after the installation completes and it doesn't boot. Be sure to verify that the boot flag is set on the proper device in the RAID controller BIOS and that that device is selected as the first boot device in your motherboard BIOS.

Problem: It asks me to insert a CD-ROM driver

  • You can skip that step and just continue on selecting the defaults ('none') and it will typically find the CD-ROM. This condition can occur when the system has multiple CD-ROM drives (or a virtual CD-ROM emulated by the BIOS). In some cases you may only have one CD-ROM drive but the BIOS is emulating a second drive hence the confusion to the installer.

Problem: It won't boot up after the installation completes

  • Check your BIOS boot order to make sure that the hard disk you installed the system to is now the first item in the BIOS boot order.
  • If that doesn't work check in the BIOS for the part that says 'Plug n' Play OS Support', and make sure that is set to 'No' or 'Disabled', then reboot.
  • If that doesn't work it may be due to an on-board SATA RAID contoller. Some motherboards have on-board SATA RAID (ASUS, others), sometimes referred to as 'fake RAID' and some of these can cause problems while others work better when that SATA RAID firmware is turned on. Go into your BIOS and look under the 'IDE Configuration' page. In there you will typically have three choices, 'AHCI', 'IDE' and 'RAID'. Generally speaking, QuantaStor works best when you have it set to 'IDE'. That said, we've seen some systems that work better when set to 'RAID' mode, but be sure to not create any RAID sets with that hardware BIOS. If you have that turned on but have no RAID sets created through BIOS then the devices will just pass-thru to QuantaStor. There is a related problem with on-board RAID controllers that can occur when trying to create storage pools that you will want to check here.

Problem: Install fails part way through

  • Try selecting 'F6' immediately when on the language selection screen appears. This will bring up an options screen. Hit 'F6' again to bring up 'Other Options', and then hit escape to close it. This step is to bring up the boot options string that we will now modify. In the boot options string that is listed remove 'nodmraid' and 'acpi=off'. You will also want to add the field 'vga=788' to fix some graphical issues that occur sometimes. Now hit enter to start the installation.

Problem: Install fails with error 'Select and Install Software'

  • Prior to 1.5 you needed to make sure that the system you are installing QuantaStor on has access to the internet. There are parts of the installation process with v1.4 where it will try to update the package repository using the Ubuntu servers and if you have a firewall or web filter in place blocking the Ubuntu repository sites you will have installation problems that shows up as an error in the 'Select and Install Software' stage.
  • Issues have also been seen with USB CD/DVD drives where the USB controller will go offline partway through the install. If you're seeing the install fail intermittently at different stages this is probably the issue, that or you have a bad CD.
    • If it's a bad CD, you can burn a new one or check the MD5 hash to make sure it matches the one posted in our Change Log.
    • If it's the USB controller then we recommend physically unplugging the power from your server for 10 seconds so that the motherboard fully powers down, then plug the power back in and reinstall. Powering off the motherboard seems to clear the on-board USB controller state and subsequently has resolved this installation problem on the HP server gear that we were able to reproduce it on.

Problem: My system disk doesn't show up in the list of disks to install the QuantaStor system onto.

  • The most common problem here is partitioning. If the disk(s) you want to use for creating a storage pool have LVM partitions on them then QuantaStor will automatically filter them out to prevent you from inadvertently stomping on it. The way to fix this is to use fdisk at the console to delete the partitions off the device. We're looking at adding a 'Scrub Disk' command to remove the partitions off of such disks so that they can be prepared for use without having to deal with fdisk.
  • This could also be a cabling problem. Some motherboards have multiple SATA/SAS controllers on-board. Try connecting your SATA/SAS boot drive to another SATA/SAS port and/or separate controller.

If all else fails, try installing plain Ubuntu Server 10.10 on the system and then use the upgrade guide to install the QuantaStor packages. This is a great way to triage problems since if Ubuntu doesn't install and run then there's a problem that's not specific to the QuantaStor installer. That typically points to a BIOS configuration or a cabling problem.