Recently the mail server at the office broke down and when trying to reinstall we ran into a major problem when installing from a USB memory stick.
The server is a two year old HP Proliant DL380 G5 that comes with a built-in HP Smart Array. Unfortunately the server for some reason did not have an optical device such as CD ROM and we only had a 1GB USB flash memory (delivery time for a CD ROM was 14 days). If we had more space on the USB stick we could have put all ISOs on the USB stick but we would probably have run into the problems anyway.
Using the standard way we downloaded the CentOS latest distribution as 6 isos. Extracted the first CD and made it bootable using unetbootin
Extracted all ISOs and put them on a local web server. Directory on the web server needs the tree structure /directory/discX/content-of-iso.
Booting from the USB and selecting HTTP install. Installation worked like a charm but when rebooting we were never able to boot the installed CentOS from the hard drive.
This is where we got stuck for more than a day. We were looking for answers in the wrong places thinking the problem had something to do with the HP Smart Array as Google suggested this was probably the cause. We probably tried all possible solutions found using “linux rescue” and even the Super Grub Disk (available for direct install in Unetbootin).
However CentOs still installed Grub on /dev/sda instead of the HP Smart Array. CentOS would install Grub on the USB stick even if explicitly told not to do so.
Long story short. Pulling out the USB stick when the language selection of the CentOS installation showed up solved the problem and CentOS booted just fine! Sometimes the solution is very simple …
Thanks to Arthur Simiyu for spending a whole evening and a whole Saturday on this.
Comments
I’ve installed Linux Mint via a LiveUSB instead of burning the iso to CD and I’ve never had this problem even though it’s not CentOS.
But it sounds as though the install is not very polished. It should show you all available drives and allow you to select WHERE you want to install the OS. But CentOS is based on Red Hat which uses the RPM system whereas I prefer Debian-based Linux distros like Ubuntu, Linux Mint, SimplyMEPIS, etc. which are known to have an intuitive install.
Thanks for your comment Max.
The above solution refers to the server version that comes as four CD ISOs (there may be a DVD ISO available as well) so there was no LiveUSB option. Our memory stick was too small too contain all the four ISOs.
The installation is done from a very simple GUI. It was possible to do all the standard disk configuration but for some reason the boot record would always be installed on the USB if it was still attached.