Boot loop on new hardware immediately after loading bzimage

[voidburn]

Hello there,

 

I was looking into refreshing my unraid server's hardware, so I went about putting together a new server, current and new specs below:

 

[ Current HW ]

HP Proliant Microserver G8

Intel® Xeon® CPU E3-1220L V2

16 GB ECC Single Bit DDR3

LSI SAS2008 based controller

2x3TB Seagate drives

1x500GB Cache drive

 

[ New HW ]

Intel i7 6700k

32 GB DDR4 @ 3000mhz

Asus Maximus VIII Gene

LSI SAS2008 based controller (migrated from the old HW)

same disks and configuration (migrated from the old HW)

 

What I'm experiencing when plugging in the usb boot drive is an immediate boot loop just after the bzimage is loaded, and can't see what happens there because no error is shown or logged.

 

I also tried upgrading from 6.8.3 to 6.9 RC2, but the same thing happens.

 

If I do a safe boot WITH gui it starts, if I do a safe boot WITHOUT gui it boot loops, which confuses me even more, the non gui safe boot should be even lighter/more compatible than the gui version.

 

Now what's puzzling, if I install a 6.9 RC2 from scratch and install a trial license everything works (no other changes to either bios/config). It feels like my usb boot drive was set up in a different way when it was created, and this is causing a problem. Can anyone guess what's going on? Is there a way to go about doing a brand new install on my existing usb boot drive without compromising the license? Is this something that can be fixed without redoing a full install?

 

Any help/insight is greatly appreciated! For the time being I just moved all the hardware back to the old server and rolled back to 6.8.3.

 

Thanks in advance

[itimpi]

Does the ‘EFI’ folder on the boot drive have a trailing ‘~’ character?    If it does then it is set to boot in legacy mode.    If it does not then it is set to support UEFI booting.   

 

[ChatNoir]

Did you have any HW passthrough for VMs on your previous setup ?

[voidburn]

@ChatNoir No hardware passthrough, there are no VMs on the setup (only docker containers)

@itimpi The EFI folder has a dash in it:

 

[itimpi]

21 minutes ago, voidburn said:

The EFI folder has a dash in it:

You could try removing the trailing ‘~’ character and see if you can then boot in UEFI mode.

[voidburn]

That must be it, I will make another attempt once 6.9 is out since I'm waiting for the ability to setup SSD pools anyway. Thanks for the input, I should've thought of looking at difference in the flash between my existing install and the fresh one.

 

Cheers!