Arch Linux

MajesticUnicorns

Member

Registered: 2017-11-27

Posts: 5

No boot from live CD

Someone please point me in the direction to get this server running

Burnt liveCD to a CD, all is good, boots into it, enter on boot live OS (i686) and then it loads one thing and then says something about time? Time not on something, I can’t remember for sure what it is. It hangs there and then drops me into a rescue shell.

Server is a Dell Poweredge 2560 if that helps.

Server is old, I just wanna mess with Arch for a change.

tyzoid

Administrator

From: Ann Arbor, MI

Registered: 2017-06-17

Posts: 86

Re: No boot from live CD

Someone please point me in the direction to get this server running

Burnt liveCD to a CD, all is good, boots into it, enter on boot live OS (i686) and then it loads one thing and then says something about time? Time not on something, I can’t remember for sure what it is. It hangs there and then drops me into a rescue shell.

Server is a Dell Poweredge 2560 if that helps.

Server is old, I just wanna mess with Arch for a change.

Is your CMOS battery dead? How far into the boot process does it get before it crashes?

MajesticUnicorns

Member

Registered: 2017-11-27

Posts: 5

Re: No boot from live CD

It said "no timer connected to IO-APIC" fixed that with the boot argument of noapic and that's gotten rid of that issue, howver has brought up another, this time to do with Initramfs and a "initramfs unpacking failed : write error :: mounting ' ' on real root"

And then it drops me into an "emergency shell" I've almost been banned from the arch forums cause I asked there twice, any help is greatly appreciated.

tyzoid

Administrator

From: Ann Arbor, MI

Registered: 2017-06-17

Posts: 86

Re: No boot from live CD

Does an older iso, or a -dual iso work?

andreas_baumann

Administrator

From: Zurich, Switzerland

Registered: 2017-08-10

Posts: 833

Website

Re: No boot from live CD

..or try another distribution first and see if that works.

Also an lspci would be useful.

How is ACPI set in the BIOS?

How is the machine accessing the CDROM-drive, because if you get the 'umount to load root' message
it means, the bootloader can read the kernel and the initramfs disk, but then the Linux kernel cannot
see the CD-ROM device.

andreas_baumann

Administrator

From: Zurich, Switzerland

Registered: 2017-08-10

Posts: 833

Website

Re: No boot from live CD

I can just tell you from my experience with old servers (in my case a HP Proliant DL140 G1) that I ended
up bootstrapping via USB boot (plopp boot loader) and an external CDROM drive, because I was unable
to boot otherwise. So you might be into some extra effort with old machines. :-)

andreas_baumann

Administrator

From: Zurich, Switzerland

Registered: 2017-08-10

Posts: 833

Website

Re: No boot from live CD

Oh. I think I had even to resort to plopkexec with a custom minimal kernel. :-)

MajesticUnicorns

Member

Registered: 2017-11-27

Posts: 5

Re: No boot from live CD

Sorted now, I could not for the life of me find an i686 iso that fitted on to a CD and that worked 'out of the box' ended up stumbling onto a distro called Lunar (lunar-linux.org). Booted fine, having issues with installing the bootloader (GRUB and Lilo), Its booting with the CD drive hooked into the RAID controller, which may have contributued why it was being so stupid. Dells eh?

Anyone have a clue why both grub and lilo are spitting out errors?

I have the drives set into a RAID 5 for 4 of them and the remaining one is set to just a volume, a 'boot drive' if you will. I have tried to install lunar to that and its spitting out errors

Thanks again

MajesticUnicorns

Member

Registered: 2017-11-27

Posts: 5

Re: No boot from live CD

Friggin' swapfile was set to 4098MB. Grr. its fixed now tho, I changed it to twice the system ram and its happy

MajesticUnicorns

Member

Registered: 2017-11-27

Posts: 5

Re: No boot from live CD

ressurected this post, its not happy, back with arch now. NICs were disabled in the bios (I am so smart.) this however hasn't solved the issues with the networking. both ethernets work flawlessly on the install live cd, I installed it with the ethernets infact, then reboot into the OS thats just been freshly installed, and both ethernets are set to 'DOWN' I bring them up with "ip addr set dev eth0 up" and still no dice anyone got any ideas?

andreas_baumann

Administrator

From: Zurich, Switzerland

Registered: 2017-08-10

Posts: 833

Website

Re: No boot from live CD

What's your dmesg showing? Do you see any NICs being detected?
What's the output of lspci (pcituils)?
Are the kernel modules for the Broadcom Gigabit NICs loaded?
Are the network devices really called eth0? Or did systemd rename them?

andreas_baumann

Administrator

From: Zurich, Switzerland

Registered: 2017-08-10

Posts: 833

Website

Re: No boot from live CD

As you seem to have a network when using the live CD, try to do an 'lsmod' then eand see, which
module is loaded for the network. Then you can load the same module on the final installation too..