Can't Install CentOS 7

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preston019
Posts: 2
Joined: 2015/03/02 02:00:09

Can't Install CentOS 7

Post by preston019 » 2015/03/02 02:11:29

Hey guys,

New to the forums here and I'm having issues installing CentOS 7.0 on my machine.

I'm installing from a USB and when I boot from it and try to begin the installation process, a screen comes up with this:

[1.331266] nouveau E [DEVICE][0000:01:00.0] unknown chipset, 0x124020a1
[1.331322] nouveau E [DRM] failed to create 0x80000080, -22
[1.543626] i2c i2c-2: sendbytes: NAK bailout

Machine specs:
i7 4930k
2x GTX 970
1x GTX 770
ASUS X79 Deluxe Motherboard

(I'm trying to dual boot with Windows 8.1)

I've read that the issue is the nouveau drivers and that they're buggy/incompatible with the GK104 chipset (GTX 770), but correct me if I'm wrong.

Is there a work around to getting past this? Obviously I need nVidia drivers, but I'm not sure how to install those until AFTER I install CentOS. :roll:

Thank you! :D

cmurf
Posts: 64
Joined: 2015/02/12 01:31:31

Re: Can't Install CentOS 7

Post by cmurf » 2015/03/03 03:29:03

http://lists.centos.org/pipermail/cento ... 50441.html

Note that CentOS doesn't explicitly have dual boot support; Fedora 21 Workstation does, however.

The CentOS media lacks the ntfs-3g package, so the installer will consider NTFS not resizable. And it won't create a grub menuentry for Windows. While this could be fixed post-install by installing ntfs-3g and running grub2-mkconfig, currently Red Hat / Fedora GRUB lack the patch to support chainloading with UEFI Secure Boot enabled. So my suggestion is to use the firmware's built-in boot manager (usually this is the F12 key at boot time) to choose between CentOS and Windows boot; I think it'd be bad advice to recommend disabling Secure Boot.

As for the nouveau problem, that's likely kernel related due to how early in the boot process it is. I suggest booting CentOS install media and at the GRUB menu choose the troubleshooting submenu and in there choose the basic video option. That should work, and this setting will be preserved by the installer when it writes out the grub.cfg as part of the install process. If basic video is OK, you can leave this alone. Otherwise you'll need to see if 'yum upgrade' gets you a newer kernel that permits dropping nomodeset (make sure remote login is working first as you may unwittingly end up with a headless computer); and if the centos repos don't have a new enough kernel you'll need to look at elrepo kernels - currently they have 3.18.6 and 3.19.0 available.
http://elrepo.org/tiki/kernel-ml

preston019
Posts: 2
Joined: 2015/03/02 02:00:09

Re: Can't Install CentOS 7

Post by preston019 » 2015/03/03 04:15:22

cmurf wrote:http://lists.centos.org/pipermail/cento ... 50441.html

Note that CentOS doesn't explicitly have dual boot support; Fedora 21 Workstation does, however.

The CentOS media lacks the ntfs-3g package, so the installer will consider NTFS not resizable. And it won't create a grub menuentry for Windows. While this could be fixed post-install by installing ntfs-3g and running grub2-mkconfig, currently Red Hat / Fedora GRUB lack the patch to support chainloading with UEFI Secure Boot enabled. So my suggestion is to use the firmware's built-in boot manager (usually this is the F12 key at boot time) to choose between CentOS and Windows boot; I think it'd be bad advice to recommend disabling Secure Boot.

As for the nouveau problem, that's likely kernel related due to how early in the boot process it is. I suggest booting CentOS install media and at the GRUB menu choose the troubleshooting submenu and in there choose the basic video option. That should work, and this setting will be preserved by the installer when it writes out the grub.cfg as part of the install process. If basic video is OK, you can leave this alone. Otherwise you'll need to see if 'yum upgrade' gets you a newer kernel that permits dropping nomodeset (make sure remote login is working first as you may unwittingly end up with a headless computer); and if the centos repos don't have a new enough kernel you'll need to look at elrepo kernels - currently they have 3.18.6 and 3.19.0 available.
http://elrepo.org/tiki/kernel-ml

Thank you for the advice!

I realize I left a little bit of information out:
I have already made unallocated space on my HD for CentOS, so that part should be okay (I think).
And as for the UEFI part, I know Windows 8.1 has a built in feature where you can change UEFI settings without going into BIOS, but for some reason I am not able to access them (UEFI settings don't show up). And I'm not sure if this matters or not, but when I go intp my boot manager (F8 for my motherboard), I have 2 options for each of my bootable USBs: The USB has, say CentOS on it, and so one option is UEFI: CentOS-7.0 and the other option is just Centos-7.0. I haven't played around with it enough to know whether it'll boot in UEFI mode or not though. But in the meantime, I have turned off Secureboot, since I thought that was the problem, which it wasn't, since I'm still getting the same errors.

And thank you for pointing out the troubleshooting menu to me, I would have never thought of it :roll:

I will post again after I try doing that again to let you know if it was successful or not! :D

cmurf
Posts: 64
Joined: 2015/02/12 01:31:31

Re: Can't Install CentOS 7

Post by cmurf » 2015/03/03 06:21:00

preston019 wrote:I have already made unallocated space on my HD for CentOS, so that part should be okay (I think).
Yes.
And as for the UEFI part, I know Windows 8.1 has a built in feature where you can change UEFI settings without going into BIOS, but for some reason I am not able to access them (UEFI settings don't show up).
I'm not aware of a Windows feature to change UEFI settings from within Windows; UEFI ExitBootServices is called so no BootServices are available to the running OS, only RunTime services are available which are limited to things like reboot/poweroff, and some boot manager variables (NVRAM).

But in any case you shouldn't need to go into firmware settings for this.
And I'm not sure if this matters or not, but when I go intp my boot manager (F8 for my motherboard), I have 2 options for each of my bootable USBs: The USB has, say CentOS on it, and so one option is UEFI: CentOS-7.0 and the other option is just Centos-7.0.
This is normal, but not exactly user friendly or at least user obvious. It's an artifact of how the media is created in order to support USB sticks, drives, and optical media, as well as computers with BIOS and UEFI firmware - all with a single image. The correct option is the first one. Some firmware differentiate these parts of the install media and therefore present two options; I've only seen this on Macs but it's possible other systems will enable the CSM-BIOS if you choose the 2nd option, which is distinctly not supportable (e.g. to have a UEFI Windows install, and a CSM-BIOS CentOS install). Granted, dual boot really isn't a CentOS thing anyway I guess... but this arrangement isn't even supportable on Fedora. It's either BIOS for everything or UEFI for everything, no mixing and matching.
I haven't played around with it enough to know whether it'll boot in UEFI mode or not though. But in the meantime, I have turned off Secureboot, since I thought that was the problem, which it wasn't, since I'm still getting the same errors.
I would turn SecureBoot back on and only fallback to off if there's no other way, especially since you're using Windows as well.

nouveau is the open source driver for NVidia graphics, so the problem you're having almost certainly has nothing to do with either UEFI or Secure Boot, and is just a bug with the kernel version you're using (or maybe it's new enough hardware that support for it doesn't exist in the kernel version you're using). The nomodeset option will disabled this, and force the use of UEFI GOP graphics (functionally equivalent to VBE graphics on computers with BIOS firmware - a.k.a. VESA BIOS Extension graphics)

Jedrek31
Posts: 2
Joined: 2015/04/12 22:11:41

Re: Can't Install CentOS 7

Post by Jedrek31 » 2015/04/12 22:30:30

Hello,

Today I managed to fix this problem. I had the same issue with Ubuntu and Centos 6.6. Here is how to fix it.

1. Create bootable USB with Centos 6.6
2. When installing Centos press any key at the bootloader to enter the bootloader, select operating system and press 'e' to enter the grub, select kernel in the list and press 'e' again to enter kernel boot options and add nomodeset rdblacklist=nouveau after quiet. This should boot Centos installation. Install the system.
3. After you install the system vim /etc/grub.conf and add nomodeset rdblacklist=nouveau after quiet again to the kernel options. This will disable nouveau driver at every boot.
4. yum install nvidia-detect
5. nvidia-detect -r This will tell you which driver you need. In my case it was 346.59 NVIDIA driver as I have NVIDIA GeForce GTX970 card.
6. Navigate to http://www.nvidia.com/Download/index.aspx?lang=en-us and choose your graphic card and operating system and download the driver. Make sure you download the correct driver.
7. chmod +x ./name_of_your_downloaded_driver.run
8. yum isntall gcc
9. yum kernel update
10. init 3
11. login as root
12. cd to the downloaded nvidia driver and ./name_of_your_downloaded_driver.run to run the installer. Follow the instructions.
13.reboot

Voila! NVIDIA driver installed.
If you have any issues let me know.

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TrevorH
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Posts: 33202
Joined: 2009/09/24 10:40:56
Location: Brighton, UK

Re: Can't Install CentOS 7

Post by TrevorH » 2015/04/12 22:55:51

Since nvidia-detect comes from the ELRepo yum repository then you must install that first. Since you already have that installed then you can skip everything past step 5) and just yum install the correct kmod-nvidia package from ELRepo. This package has the benefit that it will not break the first time a new kernel is installed - unlike the build-it-yourself version contained in steps 6 onwards. You also don't need to install gcc or any of the other development tools and future driver updates will come down the pipe as part of a normal yum update thanks to the nice people at ELRepo.
The future appears to be RHEL or Debian. I think I'm going Debian.
Info for USB installs on http://wiki.centos.org/HowTos/InstallFromUSBkey
CentOS 5 and 6 are deadest, do not use them.
Use the FAQ Luke

Jedrek31
Posts: 2
Joined: 2015/04/12 22:11:41

Re: Can't Install CentOS 7

Post by Jedrek31 » 2015/04/13 07:36:47

Thanx TrevorH, forgot to mention to install elrepo first. In my case I had to install gcc for some reason, don't know why. Thanx for the heads up!:)

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TrevorH
Site Admin
Posts: 33202
Joined: 2009/09/24 10:40:56
Location: Brighton, UK

Re: Can't Install CentOS 7

Post by TrevorH » 2015/04/13 07:43:24

You had to install gcc because you didn't use kmod-nvidia, you downloaded the binary driver direct from nvidia.
The future appears to be RHEL or Debian. I think I'm going Debian.
Info for USB installs on http://wiki.centos.org/HowTos/InstallFromUSBkey
CentOS 5 and 6 are deadest, do not use them.
Use the FAQ Luke

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