I have 3 4 HP Microservers and 2 3 of them are running OpenMediaVault
I want to use the 4HDD’s of the Microserver soley as Data disks and not the OS. For this you have options:
Boot from SD card, boot from USB (internal) and than use the Datadisks. The problem here is that it is not wise to have many write actions to a SD card or USB thumbdrive.
To solve this issue: I use an old 2,5″ HDD connected to the ODD port. (ODD power cable & internal free SATA port)
To be able to boot from the 2,5″ HDD you need a number of items
- Sata Cable
- OKS-38523 (SATA Floppy Cable) (€ 3,99)
- USB Thumbdrive (preferred 2 if you do not use a SD card)
- 2,5″ HDD (or SSD)
Size, in this, does not matter.
First connect the hardware (cables & HDD), do not insert the SD card or USB thumbdrive, do not insert the 4 Data disks (SATA) yet.
Make sure you use AHCI mode for the disks, the RAID module of HP cannot be used.
Install the OpenMediaVault ISO on the SD card, than make sure in the BIOS of the HP Microserver you can boot from it when starting the device. Insert the SD card in the slot and boot, install Openmediavault, it will detect the 2,5″ HDD
After installation: remove the SD card, Openmediavault will boot. Please remember: the 4 DATA disks are still not inserted. If you do so: OpenmediaVault will not boot, insert the USB Thumbdrive to the internal USB port.
Make sure that SSH is enabled within OpenMediavault or that you have access to the shell.
Below installation is derived from this german manual
in the GUI of OMV you can find the installation point of the USB drive, in my situation: /dev/sdb
Clean the disk with the command:
dd if=/dev/zero of=/dev/sdb count=1000
Make a bootable partition (very important to make it bootable in the interface !!)
cfdisk /dev/sdb
and do format it. (I formatted it as ext3)
mkfs.ext3 /dev/sdb1
mount /mnt /dev/sdb1
update: it is possible that your new debian version need to mount the device as ‘mount /dev/sdb1 /mnt’
I had this issue when I was installing OMV 4.x (updated: 11-04-2018 /dd/mm/yyyy)
Install grub:
grub-install –no-floppy –root-directory=/mnt /dev/sdb
Please note (when printing this: before no-floppy is dash dash (- -) (same for root-directory) and there is a space after /mnt[space] /dev/sdb
Find the device.map in /mnt/boot/grub, it is possible that you do not have it, than read further. cause than this part does not apply. (with latest debian installations it is not necessary anymore). But in my initial OMV 3.x installation I had. So If you have a device.map check the boot order:
(hd0) /dev/disk/by-id/ata-Samsung_HDD_840__500GB_S3C6NSBD57N
(hd1) /dev/disk/by-id/usb-_FreeCom_Memory_05B209083439BC14-0:0
Make sure you switch the boot order
(hd0) /dev/disk/by-id/usb-_FreeCom_Memory_05B209083439BC14-0:0
(hd1) /dev/disk/by-id/ata-Samsung_HDD_840__500GB_S3C6NSBD57N
Activate Grub:
grub-install –root-directory=/mnt /dev/sdb
Please note (when printing this: before root-directory there is a dash dash (- -) and there is a space after /mnt[space] /dev/sdb
grub-mkconfig -o /mnt/boot/grub/grub.cfg
Turn off the device, insert the 4 SATA disks and boot
01-08-2016 I’ve updated the info after noticing a missing mount and the dashes and spacing was hard to see when printing this ;-)