unable to boot RHEL 7 after installation

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Quite weird from my perspective.
I joined the developer program yesterday, downloaded the iso-image and installed it on my Intel Nuc (Celeron N2820, 2,4GHz, latest firmware) with 4 GB RAM and a 128 GB Samsung 840 Pro SSD. Server listens to DHCP but with a fixed IP address configured in the router.
I made three attempts:

1st:
UEFI and Legacy boot with UEFI as preference.
Installation (minimal) successful without errors. After booting the new system I ended up on a black screen with two penguins on the top left corner. Nothing happened after that.

2nd:
UEFI disabled, Legacy only.
TSC problem upon starting the installation DVD.

3rd
UEFI enabled, Legacy disabled.
This time server installation with GUI, again no errors.
Upon boot, you guess it, the two penguins at the top left corner of a black screen.
Booting in 0-rescue started up the GUI with the Red Hat registration process. Restarted - same result. Restarted again in rescue mode took me to a grey screen - nothing happens. At least I can ssh from my Mac into the server and I could return to a tty with ctrl-alt-F1 (or F2). Installed all updates.

Actually, I would like to normally boot into my RHEL. After having spent around 6 hours now any help is highly appreciated.

pe
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Responses

james.radtke@siriusxm.com's picture Guru 6863 points
22 August 2014 1:45 PM

I'm in a similar situation - I am unable to consistently get RHEL installed (via PXE in my case) and I have to mess around with Legacy BIOS vs UEFI for booting.

can you post output from the following:

egrep 'disk|part|bootl' /root/anaconda-ks.cfg 
parted /dev/sda print
ls /sys/firmware/efi/

Here is an example from my system (fedora 20)

[root@neo ~]# egrep 'bootl|part|disk' anaconda-ks.cfg 
ignoredisk --only-use=sda
# System bootloader configuration
bootloader --location=mbr --boot-drive=sda
clearpart --all --initlabel --drives=sda
# Disk partitioning information
part /boot/efi --fstype="efi" --ondisk=sda --size=200 --fsoptions="umask=0077,shortname=winnt"
part /boot --fstype="ext4" --ondisk=sda --size=500
part luks --fstype="luks" --ondisk=sda --size=228235 

[root@neo ~]# parted /dev/sda print
Model: ATA INTEL SSDSCMMW24 (scsi)
Disk /dev/sda: 240GB
Sector size (logical/physical): 512B/512B
Partition Table: gpt
Disk Flags: 

Number  Start   End    Size   File system  Name                  Flags
 1      1049kB  211MB  210MB  fat16        EFI System Partition  boot
 2      211MB   735MB  524MB  ext4
 3      735MB   240GB  239GB

[root@neo ~]# ls /sys/firmware/efi/
config_table  efivars  fw_vendor  runtime  runtime-map  systab  vars
pe Newbie 15 points
23 August 2014 5:35 AM

James,

Thanks for sharing!
Here is my output:

# egrep 'disk|part|bootl' /root/anaconda-ks.cfg
ignoredisk --only-use=sda
# System bootloader configuration
bootloader --location=mbr --boot-drive=sda
autopart --type=lvm
clearpart --none --initlabel

# parted /dev/sda print
Model: ATA Samsung SSD 840 (scsi)
Disk  /dev/sda:  128GB
Sektor size (logical/physical): 512B/512B
Partition Table: gpt
Disk Flags: 

Number  Start   End    Size   File system  Name                  Flags
 1      1049kB  211MB  210MB  fat16        EFI System Partition  boot
 2      211MB   735MB  524MB  xfs
 3      735MB   128GB  127GB                                     lvm

# ls /sys/firmware/efi/
efivars  systab  vars
pe Newbie 15 points
23 August 2014 8:49 AM

One step further, thanks to the wonderful help in the #rhel channel on freenode.net.

In rescue mode, edit the grub configuration file.

(Just in case another newbie like me will read this)

# cp /etc/default/grub /etc/default/grub.original
# vi /etc/default/grub

Edit the line with the words "rhgb" and "quiet", replace them with "verbose".
Run

# grub2-mkconfig -o /boot/efi/EFI/redhat/grub.cfg

and reboot. You should now see the boot progress and give you a clue where the boot process stalls.

At least I found out where I have to look next:

[0.861355] Loaded X.509 cert 'Red Hat Enterprise Linux Driver Update Program (key 3): (followed by an identifyer)'
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