boot loader fails to install for RHEL 6.7

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I have gone through the motions a few times and thus far RHEL 6.7 fails to boot after the install. I get nothing but a black screen and a flashing cursor. The install is being done from a USB key with the RHEL 6.7 boot image on it and the whole install seems to go fine from the USB key. However, at the end of the process I get asked where to install the boot loader and I select the master boot record of the first disk. I then see a big warning pop up box that says it could not install the boot loader and to click exit to exit the installation. Which is exactly what happens, the whole install process bails out and the system reboots. I remove the USB key and what I eventually get is a blank black screen with a flashing cursor.

Since RHEL uses the old GRUB loader there must be a way to manually install the boot loader ? Is there something broken in the RHEL boot install image on the USB key ?

Something entirely obvious that I am missing here?

A few details, this machine has a LSI Logic 1068E internal SAS controller and four disks. The first two disks are new Seagate 2TB disks in a RAID 1 mirror and the next two disks are two old 80G SAS disks in another RAID ! mirror. I hardly see how that matters as the partition process and format stage of install seems to run fine but there simply is no way to boot after the install.

signed , baffled dc

DC
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Responses

ir. Jan Gerrit Kootstra's picture Guru 6222 points
2 September 2015 8:55 PM

Dennis,

You say you installed the boot loader (GRUB) on the first disk.
What is in your opinion the first disk?
What partition is used for /boot? /dev/sda1, /dev/sdb1, /dev/sdc1?

Be aware that an USB key is also a SCSI device for RHEL.

So you need to match the OS disk based on the boot partition during installation.

Did you have a look at the following part of the SysAdmin guide:
https://access.redhat.com/documentation/en-US/Red_Hat_Enterprise_Linux/6/html/Installation_Guide/ap-rescuemode.html

go to subsection: 36.1.2.1. Reinstalling the Boot Loader

In your case you should try this while booting in to rescue mode, I cannot tell you how to do that from the USB key. If I have to do a manual installation I always use a DVD or DVD-iso.

Please let me know if this was any help to you.

Kind regards,

Jan Gerrit Kootstra

DC Active Contributor 115 points
2 September 2015 9:13 PM

I see the problem. The RHEL installer was written in 2004 or similar and just has no clue how to operate from a USB key. So I have to travel back in time to last decade and go get a blank DVD and burn it. Lovely.

ir. Jan Gerrit Kootstra's picture Guru 6222 points
2 September 2015 9:30 PM

I do not know whether GRUB2 on RHEL7.1 would not have this issue. So if it is to blame on classic GRUB or it is a general issue with removable SCSI represented devices that GRUB boot-loaders are able to detect.

DC Active Contributor 115 points
2 September 2015 10:56 PM

I would think that the process of installing a boot loader really comes down to a simple "dd" with the target output being sector 0 and cylinder zero of a bootable disk. Given that "bootable" is just a bios choice and not relevant here. Anyways, could be lilo or grub or joes boot loader and it would not matter because once the code is laid down on sector 0 of that zeroth cylinder we are essentially done. The RHEL installer gets confused about where the disk is that it just formatted and created file systems on and also forgets where the installer is running from. That is the issue.

So I powered up the delorean and the flux capacitor and went for a drive to a place that sells color televisions and radios with push buttons where they also had a cheap spindle of DVD-R blanks. That solves the whole anaconda installer getting lost problem.

I guess really I could just use my local tftp server and do PXE boot or even NFS but I thought that was just making life difficult.

DC Active Contributor 115 points
3 September 2015 12:46 AM

Two hours later and the system is installed and boots. Graphics is borked. I have an older machine with a NVidia Quadro 3500 in it and that isn't really working so the monitor is stuck at 1280x1024 in a weird sort of perspective. Should be 1920x1080. so that doesn't work really. No network config. That config was lost from the install process so I manually use ifconfig to setup an interface and edit resolv.conf myself. I tried to install the NVidia graphics driver and lo and behold I have a fully borked system now. Black screen.

This is not worth the effort. Debian works better.

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