MineOS (Debian, really) issues with bootloader on NVMe SSD?

Hello fellow MineOS’ers!

I recently had to replace a dead 2.5" SSD that was a few years old with another storage drive, so I picked up an OCZ NVMe drive with a PCI-E adapter, as the motherboard in the MineOS box I’m running didn’t have an M.2 slot.

Little did I know that the motherboard’s chipset more or less needs to support NVMe drives. OK, diving deeper into the rabbit hole, I blindly went and bought a motherboard that would still take the AM3+ CPU, but that had an M.2 port.

The BIOS of my new motherboard (GA-FXA990-UD3-Ultra) sees the drive, but my live USB stick with the MineOS Debian Jessie installer will get through most of the process but fails to load GRUB at that stage.

I’ve tried to use a Boot Repair Disc program but to no avail. I’ve been successful loading Windows 10 to the system, but when I wipe the partition and try for the umpteenth time, I can’t get MineOS or straight Debian Jessie to boot. I’m not sure what to do in order to get GRUB on to the NVMe, really. For the most part, Boot Repair Disc doesn’t seem want to touch the NVMe drive as it tells me something about needing to use gparted, which is fine, but when I do that, gparted doesn’t see the drive at all, and only shows the USB stick I’m using Boot Repair Disc from.

I’ve heard this is a Debian Jessie issue. I’ve seen multiple pages talking about how this is also an issue in pre 16.x Ubuntu distributions as well… I’m tempted to just run Win 10 with a VM running MineOS, but I’d really, really like to avoid that. That’d be a last resort…

Can anyone point me in the right direction, and/or has anyone else here had this problem and/or dealt with it?

Cheers!

hi dresdenk,

i’ll take a swing at this, as it seems you are up against new tech and a lack of driver support.

this might be a miss but i did not see others banging down the door to reply here.

a thing to ask: is there any other OS that will work, example freeNAS or any other that you could then install VMware on it. Basically turn your unit into a server with only VMware on it then it would be no problem to install your MineOS distro or even use the Turnkey MineOS distro, or both because you have the VMware. of course it needs to see and load your hardware and the place you bought it might help with some answers regarding OS MB/HD support.

start with the VMware system requirements to discover what you need (OS), to install it on a bare bones server (VMware might be a stand alone OS by now) as opposed to first installing win 10 and then a VM on top of that.

about win 10, it has an emulator (vm) called hyper-v that you may prefer if you look it up and/or end up going down that route.

anyway, Good Luck!

tNt

I would drop the readymade ISO and go for Ubuntu instead, since it supports NVMe:

Download ubuntu: https://www.ubuntu.com/download/server

Then there are wikis here that guides you through getting MineOS installed on top of that: https://minecraft.codeemo.com/mineoswiki/index.php?title=MineOS-node_(apt-get%2Bsystemd)

This will be you r easiest solution to this problem untill there is a ready made iso available tat supports NVMe

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Sorry to be thanking you months later - I went this way - Ubuntu + now will try to install the components on top of Ubuntu. Thanks for your pointers! It really helped.

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Hey tNt, sorry for taking so long to get back to you - I sincerely appreciate the help. I ended up looking in to VMWare and from my brief search it seems like there’s some question of the project now? I’m not sure. I read a Wiki entry I think that made it sound like the project wasn’t active any more? I may have misinterpreted that though.

Either way I ended up going with Ubuntu and will now try to install some of the components on to that.

Thanks again for helping me to see and look for a way around the issue. I appreciate that!