Hi guys & girls,
I've burnt a great many hours on this, and now, as suggested on IRC, I'll
try my luck here on the mailing list.
This is basically a copy of my question on serverfault
( http://serverfault.com/questions/787001/ubuntu-16-04-dell-r320-preseed-install-via-the-foreman
).
After lots of trial & error I've finally given up on the "SATA RAID" the
R320 provides, and resorted to using AHCI mode.
Partitioning/Provisioning work fine, but on the next boot the machine
claims to have no OS.
Booting it in rescue mode of an ISO (vFlash) I can mount the disks, chroot
to the installed OS, re-install GRUB w/o errors, but it still won't boot
afterwards. I've not seen anything like this before, btw.
Running a complete install of the ISO works as expected.
How do I identify the cause of this behaviour, and, more importantly, make
it go away?
After several attempts of the above w/ a few tweaks to the preseed install
(e.g. hard-coding the install disk to be /dev/sda, setting it via
host-parameter to make use of template, … ) I gave up on that.
I then tried taking the selections from the manual install
(debconf-get-selections --installer), filtered out anything that didn't
disk>partm>grub in it and created a preseed partitioning file for the R320
from that; using that the machine never gets past "partman: reading all
physical volumes …" … while it says this can take a long time I'll take
16h to be a failure :}
And then in my desparation … not being able to find out why/how the
provisioned system is never bootable with 16.04 I figured I'd try debian8
(Jessie) and ask them about preseed in IRC when it fails. Added Debian as
an OS in foreman, associated it with the same preseed files as Ubuntu,
changed the hosts OS from Ubuntu 16.06 to Debian, kicked off a build. Had
to answer 2 installer questions (language, hdd for grub), and had a working
server in about 30 minutes Not what I was going for. Can anyone tell me
how to find out why Ubuntu behaves so differently?
Cheers,
Andrej