I’m trying to install Rocky 10 on a Dell R620. The server has new SSD drives with nothing on them, probably not even formatted.
I downloaded the ISO, created a bootable USB with Rufus and installed it in one of the server’s back USB port.
But I can’t get it to boot off the USB drive. It dumps me into a grub-rescue shell. It gives me the error that it can’t find /boot/grub/i386-pc/normal.mod. From the grub-rescue prompt I can find normal.mod by doing an “ls (hd0,msdos1)/boot/grub2/i386-pc/”
Because it was in “grub2” and not “grub” I tried setting $prefix to /boot/grub2/i386-pc and then doing an “insmod normal” but that gives me a grub cli needs auth or something like that.
All that seemed like rabbit hole that I shouldn’t even have to do, so i came here to try to get some advice. My machine clearly recognizes the USB port, but I can’t seem to get it to boot from it. Any help would be greatly appreciated.
This is probably caused by Rufus. Did you try flashing the USB with Rufus in DD mode instead? I would try Fedora Media Writer and feed it the Rocky Linux iso to write to a USB.
Thanks. I was actually just re-doing the USB with rufus using DD mode to see if that fixed it. If that doesn’t work, I’ll give fedora media writer a try. Although that’s probably a linux utility and I am making the USB on a win11 machine. I’ll see what happens with my USB after the dd mode install finishes and go from there.
If I set it to UEFI boot, then hit F11 to get the UEFI boot menu, then select the USB, it immediately gives me a bunch of red exceptions.
If I set it to BIOS boot, select the USB, then I get the menu that asks to install, etc.. If I pick install, then I get the exceptions. If I go to the troubleshooting menu from the boot screen, there is an option to install with minimal graphics. If I pick that, I also get the exceptions.
I’m not sure how to install Rocky 10 on this server! Wishing for the “good ole days” when servers had a DVD drive, you put the DVD in and you were off an installing the server. I’ve wasted an entire afternoon just trying to get it to install. arrgh!
Quick google search suggests this server has either Intel® Xeon® processor E5-2600 or E5-2600 v2 cpus, which are sandy bridge. I believe these are x86-64-v2. The minimum required for rocky 10 is x86-64-v2 x86-64-v3. If this is the case, you will have more success with Rocky 9.
If you have a modern phone, you might be able to take a picture, then use a text recognition feature to get them (Samsung phones have that ability, and I think Google does too).
Thanks. Actually when it’s set to BIOS boot, it gives me the menu and no matter what I select, the computer just reboots. So I don’t get an error screen with BIOS boot.
With UEFI boot, I don’t get a menu and get an exception as follows:
A system restart is required.
The system detected an exception during the UEFI pre-boot environment. Press ENTER on the serial console (@115200 8-N-1) for detailed exception state.
(Current TPL = 04, TSC ticks since last even 000001241E2C)
LBRfr1 B3E5D1E3 Unknown(mwtkh) +0131E3
LBR fr0 B3E5D203 Unknown(mwtkh) +013203
–>rip B3E5D1F0 Unknown(mkwtkh) +0131F0 ←- Crash occurred here
Stack Trace not available for this exception type
Edit: Just a bit more info. I had a winPE bootable USB handy and tried that just to rule out hardware issues. It boots fine and works. So it appears to be a Rocky 10 issue, which is what i thought. Just wanted to make sure.
The os will boot, but if you use packages outside of Alma’s repo’s, you will probably struggle to find packages compiled with support for less than x86-64_v3. Least that’s my understanding of the situation.
I run a couple of VMs on synology nas in the same situation. I plan to keep running them till 2032, unless the NAS dies.
Thanks Tom. I was looking at that. I think most everything I need is in epel and it looks like they have a v2 version of epel from Alma. I guess I can also load the souce repos and compile my own, if you can find the source repos for things.
This is for a small business file server. As such, there isn’t a huge need for more CPU power. And I try to keep everything very generic and clean, so not a lot of odd things installed. It just needs consistent security updates for the long haul. But if I get it installed I can certainly check out the repos available. If the source repos are available, it’s not a big deal to build them locally.
And thank you guys for the great support! It’s refreshing to ask questions on a forum and get answers from people who know what they are talking about!!
I’m so used to asking things on forums about in depth subjects and getting responses like “have you tried rebooting?” haha