Hello,
I just acquired an HP Proliant Gen8 Microserver to use as a home server.
I installed TrueNAS CORE in a drive I added to the SATA port on the motherboard.
The system boots without any issues, but then when I add other drives in the bays, the system won’t boot any more.
I’m seeing the message “Non-system disk or disk error”.
Any idea how to select which drive to use to boot?
Thanks!
I remember that being a little tricky,
There is a SATA port on the mainboard, that was meant to be used for an ODD drive. Due to a kind of bug, it is not possible to set this a boot drive. Search for HP Microserver Gen8 boot from ODD. There is a pretty good thread on the omv forums, with input from someone actually working at HPE.
IIRC there are one or two different solutions. I installed grub on a SD-card, which then points to the boot drive. I do not remember the details, and just hope it never breaks… 
I managed to solved it thanks to the tips here: Microserver Gen8 - Boot order from different SATA ... - Hewlett Packard Enterprise Community
I changed the setting in the BIOS from AHCI to Legacy, then after I restarted I could see two SATA controllers. Then I chose the second one and could boot again.
Mmmh, but legacy actually means the proprietary raid function is activated, and it is not just passing through the disk? Not sure this is a good thing in combination with ZFS, even if it is soft raid with the HP B120i.
Here are the instructions I used, http://jarrodla.blogspot.com/, and there is a thread on omv forums, hpe proliant servers, created by Spy Alelo.
Thanks for sharing, I’ll have a look.
I’m going to reset settings, enable AHCI and to try to make this work using a SD card.
Any tips @prez02? To be honest, I’m not very experienced TrueNAS and Linux. To start with, I’m running the first command dd if=/dev/zero of=/dev/... but taking ages.
Not sure if I’m doing something wrong.
Okay, this is another description, in German, but maybe you can google-translate it? It also offers a download of a ready made image to install grub on a sd card.
Apart from that, not sure the zeroing is necessary, and if you have a large but slow sd-card, it probably takes quite a while?!
Thanks for sharing. Zeroing was not a good idea in this card, it’s still running and it will probably take all night.
We’ll see if the rest of the steps work, fingers crossed.
I may try with a USB stick, I cannot get the SD card to mount.
I tried with a USB stick and managed to make it work. Thanks for sharing the info @prez02, it was very helpful.
