Help for a Noob for Installation

Support
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Hello all, I’m new here and to Linux and NAS in general. The first thing I want to say is that I’m new to Linux and have never used Linux and command lines before. I’m trying to build a NAS with the following hardware Corei7-4790k, Asus Z97-AR motherboard, 32GB DDR3 memory, 1TB M.2 SSD, 6 X 8TB HDD, Intel X5440-T2 10GB NIC, Nvidia GTX 1070 (for use with jellyfin).
I gave tried to install Rockstor on this system but the installation failed after i followed the prompts and selected the nvme 1TB drive as the boot drive. During the installation process, I get some dependency errors and the lines of code says it is has entered emergency mode and to press enter for maintenance.

I have downloaded Rockstor-Leap15.6-generic.x86_64-5.0.15-0.install and made a bootable USB using Rufus 4.6 (in DD mode as given in the quick start guide), I’m able to boot from the USB and it opens the GRUB to install Rockstor but then get the error mentioned above.

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Hi @anchit02 and welcome to the forum.

According to your description, the error is a bit strange and we definitely need some further information about the error.

Maybe you could provide some screenshots (a picture with your phone), to provide better assistance.

I only found this thread so far with a similar issue, although it could unfortunately not be resolved.

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Here is the picture of the screen and the computer stays stuck here.

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Also, I wanna add that I’ve watched the video on how to install Rockstor on the thread that you tagged and I was seeing the installation process shown on the video. During my instance, the installation proceeds similarly, I can see the installation bar go to 100%, after than I see a lot of code flying up and then get the errors shown above. I could not get as far as to select system language. Dont know if that helps in diagnosing the issue.

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It might be a BIOS/EFI issue. How old is your BIOS?
Check the drive you’ve installed your Rockstor on, if it has some partitions (e.g ext4, a btfrs partition, etc.), it might have installed but simply doesn’t boot for some random issue.
Please note: I am also a newbie and have no certainty about what I’ve said.

My solution was to create a VM on Fedora 41 and it worked fine.

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Here is a picture of my BIOS. Its from 2015 and supports UEFI.
Also, no, I cannot check the NVME drive where the OS was suppose to install as I have no OS to run the disk. I can only access this BIOS page.

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476855439_1329012408242698_2864437373077955012_n1125×844 85.3 KB

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Also, As per your suggestion of using VM on Fedora; yea…I literally have no idea what that means, I will need to look that up. I guess Fedora is a different type of Linux OS that you have installed and then made a VM under the Fedora OS to install and run Rockstor…I’m guessing. I have no experience with Linux as I have already said and zero idea about command lines. I was looking into getting Debian 12 as it has a GUI and I’ve read online that I can do most things with the GUI like I would do in windows. So, i will have to look at that. But ultimately if I can just get Rockstor to work as a NAS, I will have accomplished my goal.

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@anchit02 Welcome to the Rockstor community.

Looks like you have the most recent BIOS on that motherboard (excluding a beta version that seemed to have been released in 2018).

I also suspect there is something going on with your installation drive as @nyctopheliac pointed out earlier. Sometimes, if it has “old” data/partitions on it, the installation won’t complete correctly, as it cannot start writing to that drive. When you look at the Pre-install Best Practices (Pre-Install Best Practice (PBP) — Rockstor documentation), it often times is better to wipe the drive up front of all pre-existing data.

If it’s a new one, you might need to check in another machine, whether it works or not.

Not sure whether you’ve done that or not, but for now disconnect all other drives but the one you want to install Rockstor on (it’s more critical if you already have Rockstor set up and want to avoid to accidentally overwrite your data on the NAS drives). That way you can ensure that the correct drive is targeted for the installation.

Finally,

do you mean, that you already selected the timezone, “locale”, keyboard layout, root password, install device, etc. and then it installs through things and fails, or does it happen very shortly after you selected the install Rockstor from the GRUB start screen?

If it is happening before you even get to pick your selections, then you might have a memory problem, since I believe it load things into memory from the install medium before attempting the installation on the system disk.

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What I meant was the install fails after the progress bar reaches of the installer reaches 100% but before the menu appears for the selection of timezone, locale, etc.

Also, I will trying wiping all the drives using shreadOS as written on the Pre-Install Best Practices page and will report back.

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ok. Thanks for the clarification.

You might have some issues with your system memory. The initial load of the OS, before it goes into that actual installation details, is loaded onto a RAM disk (i.e. into the system’s memory) if I am not mistaken. So, if something is corrupted due some faulty memory segments it could possibly explain the failure during that startup as well.

I guess, for now, see whether the drive wiping will address, but if it happens again, you might want to run memtest (also mentioned in the PBP section) for a bit on that box.

Since it’s an i7 system I assume, it doesn’t have ECC type memory (since the i7s of that CPU generation don’t support it).

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Yes, you are right about ECC memory, my system doesnt support ECC memory.

In terms of memory issue, I dont think that is the case because i already ran memtest after having this issue initially and it successfully passed 10 passes on each of the 4 RAM sticks. Also, this system was previously running Windows 10 just a few weeks ago that I was using as a simple storage in the drives.

Also, before trying to install RockStor, I had installed TrueNas-Sacle successfully on this system just 7 days ago and it the system was working with TrueNAS. But i decided against using TrueNas because it was extremely difficult for me to set up as it involved the use of a lot of command lines which i failed to get working. So as I was researching other freeware NAS OS, i came across Rockstor and tried installing it, and well here we are.

I’m presently working on wiping the my M.2 Nvme 1TB drive now that was used as the boot disk for TrueNas and also Windows 10. Will try installing Rockstor after the drive gets wiped.

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Hi @anchit02, and welcome to the community, even if you’re starting with fighting obstacles.

Thanks a lot for all the checks and verifications done above. I’m wondering if what you’re seeing could be related to UEFI vs BIOS boot. I’ll try to explain briefly:

The installer we use is a hybrid one: this means it can boot and install on either a BIOS system or a UEFI system, so that it can work on a greater variety of systems. This also means that you can choose to boot your USB stick in either one of these modes. It all depends on the motherboard, unfortunately, so it’s near impossible for us to predict that. It is also important that if you boot the installer USB stick in UEFI mode, the hard drive/SSD on which Rockstor is installed is also booted in UEFI mode (or vice versa).

I would thus recommend you to verify that you are indeed booting that USB stick (the installer) in UEFI mode. If that’s what you’re doing and are encountering the issue, then you can try booting the USB stick in BIOS mode instead.

I’m sorry I can’t give a more detailed or certain answer here. UEFI/BIOS support is incredibly variable between motherboards and can quickly become a mess. You could also try adjusting the secure boot setting in your motherboard (yet another layer of complexity).

Hope this helps, nonetheless.

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A quick update → Everything is working (i think) and I could get into the webUI. I made the admin account and followed some more prompts after which the system restarted and then I was able to get onto the UI. Here is what is looks like.

Screenshot 2025-02-19 022449
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I dont know what fixed the issue but here is what I have done after the last post:

  1. Completly wiped th Nvme drive using ShreadOS
  2. Changed BIOS setting to disable Secure Boot
  3. Tried re-installing Rockstor OS from the same USB – and this time it just worked and didnt give any errors. I followed the prompts on screen until it told me to login using the local IP address.

So, Thank you to everyone that reached out.

I didnt get a change to do any of the pool and share setups yet and I will try to do those in the next few days. I will reach out again for assistance when I get stuck.

Thanks again.

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I think @Flox point on secure boot is probably what fixed it. Wiping the nvme certainly didn’t hurt, but since the issue was happening in the beginning before even writing to the nvme left the UEFI vs. BIOS and secure boot as the root cause (most likely). I never thought of that setting, since I usually don’t set it in my BIOS on my systems when no windows is installed.

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Now that Rockstor is set up and it start automatically once the PC is started and I can access the WebUI, what comes next?

On the hardware side of things, I want to know if Rockstor has detected and managed to set up the correct drivers for my 10GB NIC (Intel X5440-T2), and my GPU (Nvidia GTX 1070). How can I check that? I’ve tried the “lspci” command on the system shell but i get an error saying the command is not found. I was able to use this command on TrueNAS to get a list of all the connected devices but that didnt work in this case.

Also, I want to use Corsair’s Commander XT as a fan controller for this box. I have found that a program called “liquidctl” (GitHub - liquidctl/liquidctl: Cross-platform CLI and Python drivers for AIO liquid coolers and other devices) can be used in a Linux environment to use Corsair’s Commander XT to set up fan curves and control the fans in the box. How would I go about getting liquidctl installed and running.

And finally, regarding the setting up of pools and drives, I would like to use the free space on the boot SSD drive to store files. Would this be possible to do? Since my boot drive is a 1TB SSD, and Rockstor OS is currently only using around 4GB; I figured that maybe I could maybe make a partition (not sure if that is the right terminology in this case but I’ve referring to how you can made multiple partitions on a single disk in windows) for system file as in C drive for OS and other system files when I set up Rock-Ons to use Jellyfin and other addons and D drive to hold media and storage files. Ideally, I would keep like 300 GB for systems files and use the remaing space in the 1 TB SSD for storage and media files. Is this possible to do? And how would i go about doing this using the WebUI.

P.S.: Apologies if my questions are dumb, as I said, I’ve not used Linux before and I’m trying to learn how to get everything set up. So, thanks for all your support and patience.

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Hopefully, you’ve created your pool(s) added some share(s), maybe created some Samba exports and now are ready to put some data on it :slight_smile:

You can take a look at the Rockons to see whether there are utilities, applications that are of interest to you.

You can install lspci as part of the pciutils package. If you’re accessing the command line via the System Shell on the Rockstor UI, after logging in, you can install it by:

su -
<root user password>
zyppper refresh
zypper install pciutils
exit

Then you should be able to use it (you will get more info if you go back into root mode, like shown above with the su - command).

If you’re using a terminal program like PuTTY to access Rockstor, then you will probably log in as the root user, so you don’t need to elevate the command prompt.

Checking quickly, there is no “ready” OpenSUSE package for liquidctl, it’s only available via the Snap store, which Rockstor is not using (more geared towards OpenSUSE installations using the KDE or Gnome desktop if I am not mistaken).

So, you can follow the manual installation guide listed on the github page, using the virtual environment option for it.

Alternatively, there is a docker container available for liquidctl

https://hub.docker.com/r/avpnusr/liquidctl

this could be a good candidate for a Rockon (since that’s based on Docker), but the configuration file for that needs to be built first.

Maybe somebody else on the forum has either an alternative to that or some additional suggestions.

We strongly recommend NOT to use the boot drive to store any files. The design intent of Rockstor was to separate OS and data concerns, so that, in case you need to fix/reinstall the OS, you don’t have to do any additional work to preserve your data. With that said, of course you can store it on the OS drive.

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Sorry, I think I stand corrected. You can run the snap via command line. So, the simplest way is to follow the instructions here:

Ensure that between installing the snap store and enabling it you either logout/log back in or reboot the system before installing liquidctl (it should give you a message to that effect after the snap store install), so that when it comes back up you can then proceed to install the fan control package.

like in the previous post, if you’re using the WebUI system shell, put yourself into elevated mode with

su -
and then you can execute each of the commands listed on that page without using sudo in front.
Which should give you liquidctl installed within a few minutes.

BTW, in case you have not figured that out yet, when using the WebUI system shell, there’s no direct copypasta you can do. You need to right-mouse click for the context menu in the system shell and select paste from browser which launches a pop-up into which you paste what you copied from someplace else.

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I was able to get some of the things to work based on the assistance you provided. Using the su - command I was able to get lspci command to work and saw that my devices were connected to the box. I also managed to use the command line with elevated permission to install the nividia drivers for my GTX 1070Ti GPU. I ran the nvidia-smi command to confirm my GPU and the latest driver is installed. So far all good.

I was also able to install liquidctl using snap and by following the instructions provided on the page that you linked. I checked and verified that liquidctl is installed and i can use the command liquidctl list to see my connected device as well. Then I hit a snag. when i ran the command liquidctl initialize to access my device as written on the github instructions page for liquidctl and i came across a permission error. I’ve googled the error and tried a few ways to get the permission issue sorted but no joy. I’m attaching a screenshot to show the error i got as well as the commands i have tried to sort out the issue. Any help will be appreciated.

Screenshot 2025-02-20 003514
Screenshot 2025-02-20 0035141888×900 75.2 KB

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see whether the --direct-access might help.

Also, when looking at the udev file on github, it has the comment (broken) behind it …

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Thanks for the reply. Not sure how to use the --direct-access as in I’m not sure what to put in the shell to use that command. Also, since the Core XT has the broken comment, I can try using commander pro. I have that device too and it doesnt have the broken tag. I will swap out the parts and get back to you.