HP Proliant G8 microserver boot options

[JDavid]

Greetings,
I've picked up a HP G8 microserver and am searching for a way to boot from an NVME drive in the PCI-E x4 slot. I can load TrueNAS on the drive successfully but I've been unable to figure out a way to make the hardware boot from it. I'm guessing I'm doing something HP never thought of but I really want the OS to be on a separate drive from the 4xHDD drives.

Any thoughts? My other alternative is to remove the DVD and put a sata drive in its place but I'd like to keep the removable drive as well.

Thank you for your time.

p.s. this is what I'm using for the drive in the PCI-E slot

NVMe M.2 SSD to PCIe X16/X8/X4 Card

Enjoy extremely fast transfer speeds via PCIe lanes. Includes a heatsink and thermal padding. SSD bus interface: NVMe. (NOT compatible with SATA M.2 SSD) SSD form factor: M.2 M-Key. (NOT compatible with B-Key SSD) PCI Express physical interface: PCIe x16/x8/x4 slot. Logical interface / PCIe...

sabrent.com

 

[louie1961]

I don't own and have never played with one of these machines, but with a bit of searching I may have come up with some options. But take this with a large grain of salt. There is an internal usb port that you could boot from if you load TrueNAS or Unraid on a micro usb stick. The other thought I has was to put a low profile SAS/SATA Host Bus Adapter into the PCI port. You could, in theory at least, unplug the backplane from the motherboard and plug the 4 hot swap bays to the HBA. Then if you can find an appropriate breakout cable for the SFF 8087 connector on the botherboard, you could add in a boot drive or a mirrored pair of boot drives. But the problem becomes where to stick the new drives themselves. Maybe if you use 2.5 inch SATA SSDs, you could velcro them somewhere in the case. All of this is just speculation.

 

[nexox]

I'm guessing I'm doing something HP never thought of

I think NVMe just didn't exist when they wrote the BIOS and there was no reason to go back and add boot support. I would probably just use a USB stick for a bootloader which then loads the OS from NVMe, not that I've done that in a long time (well before NVMe or EFI,) but there should be guides.

 

[JDavid]

I'll give a USB boot a go thank you both for the quick response. I think I have a PCI-E to SATA card I could try as well so I'll give that a go. Thank you =)

 

[louie1961]

I don't think the backplane on that machine has SATA connectors, just that SFF 8087 connector if my sources are correct. But maybe a PCI- SATA adapter with a good boot ROM might work for your boot drive.

 

[JDavid]

I don't think the backplane on that machine has SATA connectors, just that SFF 8087 connector if my sources are correct. But maybe a PCI- SATA adapter with a good boot ROM might work for your boot drive.

It does have a single sata connector for the optional DVD drive that's on the motherboard. That is an option for me if I remove the DVD drive it came with. I'll look around for a controller with a boot ROM that the HP bios recognizes. Thanks for the reply.

 

[nexox]

You could also use the DVD SATA port for your boot drive and connect the DVD drive to an add-on card with questionable boot ROM, or even probably a USB adapter.

 

[Arnaud]

I have a microserver here, it can boot from the internal USB or the extra SATA port for the dvd drive (I plugged a SATA SSD here to install truenas).

Bear in mind there is no UEFI or GPT support, if your OS cannot install on a regular MBR (yay for Truenas scale), you would need to chain bootloaders, with for example grub installed on a USB stick in the internal port.

 

[JDavid]

I'm going to try something different with this build just for a test. I have a USB-NVME adapter... a 6" USB extension cable and a WD NVME drive with a big heat sink on it. I'm using the internal USB connector, the short cable, and the adapter and I'm loading TrueNAS right now as the boot loader found the contraption I'm going to be using as an OS drive. Keep in mind this is just for fun as I don't expect TN to be happy running on "usb" even though its an NVME drive.

If this works I can keep my SATA DVD drive and still have a NAS. Thanks for all the suggestions I'll try to post more as I go. It would have been great for the PCI-E slot to boot but as others have said this is an old system and PCI-E nvme drives didn't exist back then.