Cent OS 7 fails install - blinking cursor dell poweredge T630

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Biermeister
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Joined: 2019/01/12 01:56:13

Cent OS 7 fails install - blinking cursor dell poweredge T630

Post by Biermeister » 2019/01/12 02:02:01

I realize it's been a year on this thread, but did you ever get it work? Did ANYONE ever get CentOS 7 installed on a Poweredge T630?

I ask after weeks of frustration trying to get Ubuntu installed, to no avail. Perhaps a dozen attempts every which way. I had no idea these servers were so reinforced like this that you must do things their way or the highway. My Ubuntu installs would either fail outright, never work (blinking cursor), or work for the first boot, survive full update/upgrade/install-other-stuff, then Error out on reboot in a Grub loop.

I'm trying to decide if I should install through the official T630 process (which means, I think, only RH or Suse EH), or manually go with Centos since it's very nearly RH and I've heard others got it to work.

Please be kind, I'm not a software/IT guy, reasonably adept working my way through linux systems, but new to servers. Silly me, I thought a computer was a computer... ;)

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TrevorH
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Re: Cent OS 7 fails install - blinking cursor dell poweredge T630

Post by TrevorH » 2019/01/12 15:28:56

I have split your post away from the original thread viewtopic.php?f=47&t=65677 as it's a) been a long time and b) it sounds like a different problem.

I have never used a T630 but as far as I'm aware it's exactly the same hardware as an R630 but in a tower case instead of a rack mounted one. I have done dozens of installs on R630s without a problem.

Here's what I recommend you try. First download the full CentOS 7.6.1810 DVD iso image - not the minimal or the Everything DVD or the netinstall iso images. Once downloaded, use a utility that can give you sha256sum calculations and run that against the iso image that you downloaded. Now check that that matches the list published in the 7.6 Release Notes https://wiki.centos.org/Manuals/Release ... ntOS7.1810

If it doesn't match, download it again until it does (or use a bittorrent download which will reject pieces that are not correct and redownload them automatically).

Once you have an iso file that has the correct sha256sum, write it to a USB stick using a linux system and the 'dd' utility. You must write the iso image to the entire USB stick and not to a partition on it - e.g /dev/sdx and not /dev/sdx1 etc. If you think your USB stick may not have written it correctly then you can reverse the dd process to read from the USB stick and write to a disk file - you'll have to specify the number of blocks you wrote to the USB stick (which the original dd will have told you when it ended) to copy only those sectors that belong to the iso image. Once that's done you can then sha256sum the new file that you wrote by copying it back to make sure it has the same contents as the one you wrote to the stick in the first place. If you suspect you have a dodgy USB stick, try a different one.

Now boot from the USB stick. If it does not work then reboot and this time start by using the "Troubleshooting" option off the initial menu that you see and then use the option under that to install with plain video (I forget what it's called but it uses the most basic video mode available to avoid problems with video drivers). If that doesn't work, do it yet again and this time, still using the basic video option, hit the tab key while the basic video option is highlighted and it will let you amend the parameters passed to the kernel. Using the arrow keys find any mention of either 'rhgb' or 'quiet' and delete them before you press enter to start the install. Take a screenshot of what you see when it fails at that point and post it here.

The Dell iDRAC also keeps logs of hardware errors. Look in there and see if anything is being logged that might indicate a hardware problem. There are two different sets of logs, look in both for anything that might give a clue.

Is your machine set up to use legacy BIOS or UEFI/Secure Boot. Try changing that from one to the other. I use legacy BIOS on all mine.

You might also try downloading memtest86+ and writing that iso image to a USB stick and booting from that and leaving it running for the rest of the weekend to see if it finds any problems. Hopefully your T630 has ECC RAM so this won't find anything wrong (though the iDRAC logs might contain corrected ECC errors indicating that you might need replacements).
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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