Installer Bootloader/GRUB Setup Failure: vyos-1.5-rolling-202501140634-generic-amd64

I have tried to install VyOS on an HP Enterprise ProLiant server.
The server boots into the VyOS live disk ok.
when I run “install image”, the installer correctly detects a pair of NVMe drives and offers to pair them into software RAID-1. Then the installation continues and appears to have completed successfully. The installer claims to have written bootloaders to both the physical disks.

But when I reboot, I land in the grub> prompt.

I tried again, booting from the live disk, then wiping the partitions on both physical disks, then running the installer. This time, I declined the software RAID1, and chose to install on just one physical disk. The installer again claimed to have completed successfully, but when I rebooted, I again landed in the grub> prompt.

I tried an earlier 1.4-based rolling image. It didn’t offer to pair the disks into RAID1, so I just chose one of the physical disks. The installer claimed to complete successfully, and when I rebooted, it booted into the installed VyOS without complication.

In the installer interactions for 1.5, I haven’t seen any prompts which might affect how it sets up GRUB and the bootloader, so I’m now wondering if this particular server is hitting some edge case in the installer.

Thanks in advance for any advice.

i see the same behavior on vyos-1.5-rolling-202501140634-generic-amd64, vyos-1.5-rolling-202501100007-generic-amd64.iso and vyos-1.5-rolling-202412310006-generic-amd64.iso

Could be this bug? T6737

No, unrelated. I checked and it’s set to 512 in my case.

Silly question but after reboot did you check the bios to ensure the correct boot device is selected, I did a similar install on a rapid pair then a reboot went back into live environment before resetting the boot priority in bios

Does your Proliant boot with UEFI or does it support legacy (CSM, etc) booting?

I tried repeatedly to install 1.5-rolling-202501110007 onto a UEFI-only system last week with a lot of issues:

  • The installer didn’t want to boot at all. I had to use Ventoy to chain-boot into the VyOS installer. Without that, the BIOS didn’t see my USB drive as bootable. I created it via dd of=/dev/sdX from a Linux desktop, nothing fancy.
  • Installing without RAID1 worked fine.
  • Installing with RAID1 booted to grub> with no config. I tried installing 3 times and tried booting from both drives. I didn’t see any errors on the console, it just didn’t work.

I have a test system that I can throw an extra NVMe drive into and try reproducing if that’d help.

Also – after doing a (failed) RAID 1 install, the next install still booted to grub> , because the BIOS tried to boot to the second drive of the bad RAID 1 install. That’s obviously not a VyOS bug.

I had to select the correct boot device (or remove the partition from the second device) to get the non-RAID install to boot.

The HPE ProLiant BIOS with default IPMI setup first tries each SSD in turn, then it goes down the list with netboot and eventually CD.

Possible fix:

When using 4k blocks on the storage you must use UEFI as bootmethod in the BIOS (instead of CSM/legacy/no UEFI).

The legacy boot only supports 512 bytes on the storage drives.

Optional if you want to have secure boot enabled or not (I prefer to use UEFI with secure boot disabled).

Thanks.

When interacting with the install image console prompts, are there any special options needed?

With the HPE ProLiant, the boot security is already set to UEFI with secure boot disabled).