Issue installing OS on T430 with H730

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almon17

New Member
Oct 10, 2022
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Hi all, I just picked up a Poweredge T430 with a PERC H730 as well as 4x4 TB SAS drives. I have those installed and have been trying to install Proxmox and have been getting nothing but errors.

When trying to install using RAIDZ-2 I get an error that the ZFS root pool could not be created. So I tried installing to a single disk and got an error that it was unable to initialize physical volume /dev/sda3. I tried with each of the 4 drives individually and got the same error but instead referencing sdb3, sdc3, and sdd3.

So I tried going the route of installing Debian first and when trying to just install it on a single disk I got the error: The creation of swap space in partition #3 of SCSI1 (0,2,0) (sdc) failed. I tried on each disk and got the same error.

That was all in HBA mode, so I tried to create a RAID using the H730. Each time I created one (RAID 1, RAID 10, RAID 6) it showed the status of the RAID as failed. When I would go into the Debian installer, neither the array nor the disks showed up so I could tell it wasn't working.

I have flashed the latest firmware to the RAID card and still no luck. I installed smartmontools on a USB trial of Ubuntu and all 4 came up as OK SMART status. Can you think of anything I am doing wrong that would prevent me from installing the OS on the server? Thanks!
 

pricklypunter

Well-Known Member
Nov 10, 2015
1,708
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Canada
Are the disks formatted to 512e, not some funky 520 or something? Have you tried installing an OS onto a direct attached disk?
 

almon17

New Member
Oct 10, 2022
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Got it figured out. They were SED drives so I had to use sg3_utils to format the drives. Then it let me create the ZFS pool.