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Grub Error 2.3.1 SD-Card Boot

Hello,

I have been trying to get PetaSAN 2.3.1 to boot from an SD card (yes I am aware of the issues associated, they are being ignored for the sake of this project). The install goes very well, no errors reported, after first reboot grub drops to rescue mode. I have tried several installs and all the same while installing to the SD-Card. Install to a SSD or a spindle drive and no issues.

in rescue mode I am able to ls the sd-card and determine the boot location. set the boot and root parameters but on "insmod normal" I get the same error that causes grub to drop to rescue mode: error: attempt to read or write outside of disk 'HD0'.

I can see all files but those inside /boot.

 

using 128GB sd-cards on HO BL465c-G7 and G8 blades, also same issue on DL385-G6,G7 and G8.

oddly this works if installed in a USB to SD card reader, but will not boot while in internal SD slot even if created in USB reader (issue with drive UUID changing)

 

asking for thoughts since I have run out of ideas.

 

Aside from we do not support this..

-was this working before in 2.3.0 ?

-not sure if you are able to fully boot the node by specifying boot device in boot command line, if yes, you should be able to add these settings as default in grub conf file

-can you try to switch booting as EFI/BIOS as see if this helps.

Support aside,

 

This was working in 2.0,

The bl465c-g7 bios automatically switches between legacy and efi boot. There is no soft switch I can flip to control this.

The servers boot fine if installed on a ssd or spindle drive, so I am not sure if it is actually the bios doing this. The SD-card looks like an sata-ssd from the system point of view.  This is more like the way petasan creates the drive partitions, maybe not enough space is allocated for the /boot ??

I know that when we build kiosk systems that we have to be very careful about the partition sizes or we run into issues, but we have always placed the /boot folder on the root partition.

 

For reference notes:

Debian 9.4 boots in this config fine

Ubuntu 11.04 boots

Xenserver 6.5 and 7.0 boots off the sd-card.

 

PetaSAN 2.0 was using syslinux, we have since move to Grub 2, so there is a change there. We are also using a newer / different kernel. Some factors to could be hardware/firmware not having support to boot from sd, or could boot form either efi or bios mode, in such case you need to install PetaSAN under this mode from the beginning (ie do not install in efi if sd card boot is only supported in bios. Another thing is Grub configuration maybe need to specify Grub modules that read from SD card to be included in the Grub boot sector. Another possibility is that Grub boots fine but the init ram disk (initramfs) image that is called by the kernel to configure the root partition does not include the SD card drivers/modules. So if you want, you can look these areas.