NASLite Network Attached Storage

I have now had v2 running stable for several weeks. I removed the CDROM used for setup, and added (one at a time) two new disks. First one installed properly, was recognized by the system and formatted as one 400 GB partition. I shutdown, attached the second new drive, turned on the power and booted to a "grub>" prompt. What happened . . . and more importantly, what do I do now?

NASlite does not use the grub boot loader, so one of your new drives is likely bootable. Best approach is to set your BIOS boot order properly.

Tony,

These are new Barracudas right out of the box. The boot order is set as follows. First boot device-disabled, Second-disabled, Third-disabled, Other-enabled.

I removed the new drive. System booted correctly.
I reattached the CDRom drive and booted a live linux. With one of the new drives attached (hdb), I ran cfdisk and set a single logical 400 GB partition, type-Linux, not bootable and wrote the table. Shutdown. Swapped out the new drive with the other new drive and did the same thing. Shutdown.

With one of the new drives attached (hdb), I rebooted . . . to "grub>".

What am I doing wrong???? HELP!!

So you have no boot order specified , thus your machine hits the first device it finds - most likely one of the new drives. At this point I’m pretty sure that one of the new drives (most likely the second one) has had grub installed on it prior to your purchase.

At this point none of the NASLite variants use grub, so you are definitely booting a device other than the NASLite device.

Grub is likely on the MBR, so the partition makes no difference. Set the boot order properly to force the BIOS to ignore the disk on boot.

OK ... So I have made a dumb mistake. Simply pointing that out to me is not helpful. I already knew that. I also can deduce that you are probably right that the system is finding the new device and somehow trying to boot from it.

The relevant question is "What do I try now?"

Have tried all the options pertaining to USB in the "First Boot device" BIOS settings. All with the same result.---Is there another place to "set boot order?"

As I said in my last post, I have only one partition on the new drive which is reporting as no bootable flag. So how do I get rid of whatever exists on this drive?

Tony,

I am a little testy today. Working on this all morning with a cold has me frazzled. Sorry for my last rant. I am simply trying to get this thing running and seem to be somewhat dense today. Thanks for your help.

I’m sorry. It’s often difficult to gauge what one’s proficiency level is and what constitutes a proper response. I’ve seen people get pretty upset with an answer, regardless of my approach.

Anyway, there are some boards that will boot USB only if set as “other”, so in order to avoid booting from the drive, we’ll have to kill the boot loader. If you have a way to boot a Win98 or equivalent boot floppy with fdisk, you can kill the grub boot sector by using “fdisk /mbr” or something like that. Alternately you can use dd in Linux to zero out the boot sector using the following:



I’m assuming we are still dealing with /dev/hdb. That will kill everything from track-0, so the drive will no longer be bootable.

Hope that helps

Tony,

Thanks for your help. I have the server up and running again. No CDROM. Booting from USB. 2-250 GB and 2-400 GB drives. Data from the old locations being copied as I type.

Glad you're back in business