Hp Proliant Ml10 V2 Boot From Usb

[Frida Kosofsky]

Icreated a single logical disk, of type RAID0, and (very important) only selected the one boot drive I wanted to use (in my case the drive on port5). This did not wipe the data for the disk for me. I left my other drives unallocated.

I'll have to try this method, but it sounds like a big work-around to get to boot from a port 5 connected SATA drive? Coming from the (older) HP N54L, booting from any of the connected SATA (or RAID) drives seemed more easy to specify.

There is no other firmware available that gives more flexibility around choosing which drive to boot from, instead of just going for the first drive found (which seems a bit simple, but possibly perfectly sensible with business environments that would run fully RAID redundant system and data disks)...

After struggling for two days, I can confirm the above is the (only?) way to install an OS on SATA port 5 or 6, i.e. the onboard ports, not the 4x SAS connected cable for the 4x data disks on port 1-4.

Make sure to enable the B120 RAID controller. Download HP SSA on a DVD or USB, USB connected it to the HP ML10 v2, boot into SSA to configure a RAID0 logical device with the only port 5 connected INTEL SSD. Before leaving SSA, select the logical device as a bootable device, and after that an OS (CentOS 7.3 1611 Minimal) installs smoothly onto the INTEL SSD. I chose not to have a redundant system disk, but you can RAID1 equal disks on port 5+6.

The strange thing is, that after the install of the OS, on rebooting, the logical device disappears. I can only assume that this is because the logical device information is probably written on the SSD somewhere, and overwritten by the installation of the OS. Luckily enough, starting SSA again, and redoing the logical device and bootable option, the system reboots just fine into the previously installed OS. I.e. the OS is not impacted by the recreation of the Logical Device.

Coming from a Proliant HP N54L, the process seems a bit over complicated. Shouldn't be that hard for HP to put an option in the BIOS that allows you to select a bootable drive other than the first one found (typically one of the disks in ports 1-4). I guess corporate users will not find it a problem, but considering the price point of the ML10 v2, you would assume it is targeted at advanced home users or small businesses. Making the installation process more user friendly is a must.

Can't wait for my additional 12GB of Crucial (ECC) memory to arrive, and then test out the performance of the Pentium CPU with two VMs (in KVM) to run on the core CentOS 7 installation, and see if a XEON is really needed or not. I've also added an AMD graphics card (for no particular reason other than to try as I had it lying around). And the Startech PEXSAT34SFF is also working flawlessly enabling another 4x 2.5" SATA drives in a 5.25" ICY-DOCK ExpressCage. The only problem with that is cabling the SAS-4xSATA cable back from the ICY-DOCK into the PCI connected RAID card, with the transparent plastic air-flow control case within the ML10 v2. I might just have to cut a whole into it..

It is a server that runs as my home NAS with Samba, Plex Media Server for media content, TimeMachine (through netatalk & afpd) for the Mac backups, and a Windows 10 VM to run an isolated NordVPN proxy. Next challenge, is to bond the NICs and aggregate them into my Netgear smart switch, and see if we can speed up files tranfer in and out of the Samba server.

I also have had a problem where the offline SSA utiltity live CD failed to boot. It dumps me out at a command prompt. Not sure why. I will attempt downloading it again, maybe my download was correupted or something.

an alternative and more foolproof manner to boot from an SSD, is to reroute the cables. you possibly want to purchase some SATA extension cables. I have two SSDs of my SATA port 1 and 2, and have ports 3+4 and 5+6 connected to my 3.5" mechanical storage drives in the bay. set the controller type to AHCI and they'll be 6 independent drives visible to the OS (sd[a-f] in Linux). it will boot perfectly fine from the first drive sda.

There are two ways to accomplish this. Either you configure the SATA ports to be in RAID mode and connect an SSD to SATA port 5 or 6 and use the SSA tools to configure the drive as a logical boot device, which is cumbersome and sometimes it loses the configuration!? Easier is it to set the drives in AHCI mode and reroute the cables, and connect cable one of the drive bay to your boot SSD. I actually got two SSDs of the first two SATA ports, and use SATA ports 3,4,5,6 for the 4 drive bay and use mdadm for a RAID5 over 4 drives.

How do I go about doing that? In the HP SSA, it says there are no controllers detected when I try and configure the RAID. Is there a driver I am missing? I am pretty sure I have the most recent firmware. I am trying to get to boot via SSD but when I choose it as the first device, it just goes to the second option.

Hi Bernie, it's been a while I used this, but indeed within HP SSA you should be able to see all physical SATA devices connected. If I remember correctly you can then create a logical device with the SSD, which you assign as the boot volume. And then on reboot the SSD logical device should be visible to your USB OS installation.

What I did notice however that on occasions, maybe once or twice a year, for some unexplained reason the logical volume would disappear and you can no longer boot. You can then reactive the volume using SSA without the need to reinstall the whole thing.

To prevent all these problems, and even I had many issue booting into SSA with particular releases (I think I had to use some other versions), I decided to go a different route. I got myself a pair of SATA extension cables and rerouted the internal cables. So I now have the SSD connected to the spider cable that was connected to the first drive in the bay, and have shifted all the cables up. So the 4 HDD in the bay are now connected to two of the SATA spider cables, and two of them to the separate SATA 5+6 ports.

With the config set to AHCI mode, the drives show up in the right order with the SSD connected to SATA port 1 and it will always try to boot from there. No more hassle with SSA, etc. I think long term this is a better option than going the logical volume config route with SSA.

P.-S.: After reading your question more thoroughly you are not seeing the controller. I'm not sure but you may have to use one of the HP SSA versions... I noticed that with the newer versions I couldn't get it to work either, or some of them even didn't boot. The last version I kept was ssaoffline-3.25-4.0.iso, so maybe you can try to see if that solves something. It is likely that in the BIOS you need to set the controller to the right mode as well, so play with those settings a bit. Please do all this before installing a server, because some of these settings may screw up your OS install, or worse, your data drives.

Thank you SO much for a response Niels. I have been using the offline SPP 2018110. That could be a reason why I do not see it. Though, a real older version didn't see it either. I will try another one. It has been really frustrating. I've tried each of the RAID bios configurations and still nothing. Hopefully the image you named will work.

no worries and good luck. you should be able to get to boot from an SSD drive on SATA port 5 or 6 using the logical volume config in HP SSA. however if you still struggle, a better long term solution is probably rewiring the internal cables with some SATA extension cables (they're cheap on eBay and come in the single connector with power and SATA). you'll need two of those and some regular power and SATA cables, and then shift all the internal SATA spider cable up by two ports, leaving space for your SSD (or two) on port 1 + 2... set storage mode to AHCI and you'll easily boot of SATA drive 1. no more hassle with the internal SATA controller, etc. i use CentOS mdadm software raid on my data drives. if you're not using CentOS but some other, you may get a kernel as well that allows you to configure for instance a 2nd SSD as a "bcache" drive, which will allow you to speed up network writes to your mechanical raid... endless possibility to tinker with this machine. I've got netatalk installed so it is an Apple Timemachine backup device, I've got KVM VMs running, I've got Plex as a media server, etc.

The latest issue is that I need to change from a DVI monitor to a DisplayPort one. The motherboard only has DP outputs, and I've been running with a plug-in DVI card. To check the DP output, I disconnected the drives, and tried booting with:

I then checked the BIOS (AMI Aptio). This is much less useful than some (Dell, for example), but it does have two relevant settings. I changed the 'onboard graphics' from 'auto' to 'enabled', and tried again, with no change - still no way to get DP.

There's one more setting, to 'skip scaning of external gfx card'. I eventually enabled this, against my better judgement, and the system is now completely bricked - there's no video output at all when I power on.

My immediate problem is that I can't find any way to reverse this change. The manuals say that removing the battery for 10 minutes will clear the NVRAM, but this doesn't seem to be true. I've disconnected all cables from the box, in case one was powering the NVRAM, and had the battery out for 10 minutes, but I still don't get any video from the plug-in DVI card or the DP. So, the 'NVRAM' is presumably actually flash.

I've tried this several times, with and without the DVI card plugged in. The server does re-boot at this point, but still no video, anywhere. Note also that the BIOS screen won't display unless you've got a relatively hi-res monitor attached, which seems pretty dumb for something billed as a server.

I am an "newbie", but will share what I know. Last week, I installed Ubuntu 20.24 (the desktop/Server package) on my ASUS Sabertooth, R2.0 motherboard, running an eight core AMD chip at 3.8 G-Htz, with 8 gig of ram, having a WD 2.0 T-bite HD. It would not boot up to the start up screen. During installation, the internet connection was severed. I determined that was the cause. Installation would hang, giving a[WARNING]... After asking some questions, and looking over answers, using this forum and answers from internet searches to accomplish the updates, I opened the terminal and installed updates for all my apps, which I chose during setup. Finally, after some frustration, the updates were installed, but it still would not boot up, even though it did boot further than where it was prior to the updates/up-grades. Afterwards, I found one suggestion suggested to disconnect all exterior drives. After I removed my CD/DVD drive, it did boot up completely for me. Part of the process included booting up again, with my installation flash drive inserted. I believe this gave the boot process access to information it needed to correct the problems made by the interrupted network during the first installation. At any rate, my server boots up now. I am able to access the desktop area with my password, although I am still in the process of completing my server set up.

3a8082e126