Did anyone manage to get a NUC8i7HVK up and running with the current ROCK installation? That is the only NUC i have access to so love to use this one to try out ROON, instead of buying a new one from the supported list.
The NUC is happily running the current Ubuntu Desktop distribution. I’ve followed the installation instruction for ROCK, but on booting it halts after the “Welcome to GRUB!” screen, the SSD LED flashes every ~2 seconds, nothing else happens. Tried two USB sticks and one SD Card with the “roonbox-linuxx64-nuc4-usb-factoryreset.img.gz” image.
If it works with Ubuntu, why not just use that? The RoonServer running in Rock and Linux is the same. Plus, Ubuntu gives you the option to monitor thermals, run drive and ram diagnostics, etc.
You’ll need to remove the old boot block from your repurposed NUC before installing Roon OS. To do this, you’ll need to boot your NUC from an Ubuntu live image. This article may help:
Once you’ve booted the live image, get to a command prompt and use the command lsbkl to get a list of disk devices known to the kernel. You’re looking for the NVMe SSD that you’re going to use for Roon. So look for a device that matches the capacity and that is not mounted (nothing listed under MOUNTPOINT).
For sake of discussion, let’s say that the device name is sda. You’ll use a command like the following to clear the GRUB boot block:
# wipefs -a /dev/sda
If you don’t get any errors back, you should be all set. Depending on the live image, you may have to use sudo wipefs -a /dev/sda instead.
Note: don’t just blindly use /dev/sda. Make sure you choose the correct device name that matches your NVMe SSD. There’s no way to “undo” this operation if you choose the wrong drive!
Now you can power off the NUC, re-flash with the Roon OS boot image and give it another go. Hope this helps.
Thanks, i successfully wiped the SSD device /dev/nvme0n1. This did not fix the problem with being stuck at “Welcome to GRUB!” unfortunately.
Any idea what happens while the message is being displayed, what could have gone wrong? Is there an option to turn on debug output to find out where it stops working?
Recheck the BIOS options. I’m not 100% sure about the latest requirements, but I thought it required Secure Boot to be disabled and Legacy Boot to be enabled. [Edit: This info may be outdated and no longer correct.]
Thanks for your feedback! Secure boot is disabled, i don’t see any options for Legacy Boot (latest HNKBLi70 Bios), there is only a “USB Legacy” option which is enabled.
I also tried to disable the Thunderbolt ports and enabled UEFI 3rd party drivers on boot, but no difference. Still stops after “Welcome to GRUB!”
That should completely wipe out the bootblock on the old NVMe drive. In the unlikely event that this does not work, you may be looking at buying a new NVMe drive, but let me know how you get on.
…just to be sure, you don’t have any other (possibly) bootable devices connected to your NUC (internally or externally), do you? For this exercise, the only connected storage devices should be the internal NVMe SSD and (temporarily) the thumb drive you’re using to boot the Ubuntu live image or Roon OS install image. And…you’ll remove that thumb drive after installing Roon OS.
For example, if you have an internal 2.5 inch SATA SSD for music that was previously used as a Linux boot drive, it may have a GRUB boot block.
If the only internal storage is the NVMe SSD and no storage is connected via USB, we know for sure that the GRUB message is coming from the NVMe. I’m just trying to consider other possibilities in case zeroing out the NVMe does not work.
There is no other bootable device connected, just the internal NVMe and the ROCK installer USB.
I’ve removed the NVMe from the NUC and the behaviour is similar, the NUC boots from the ROCK USB stick, “Welcome to GRUB!” is displayed and nothing else happens. Have also tried to press ESC or C while booting to get into the GRUB menu, but that did not work either unfortunately.
Ohhhhh…that’s a horse of a different color. It’s the thumb drive that you’re using to boot the Roon OS installation image that has the GRUB boot block. Not the internal NVMe SSD.
To solve that, reformat the thumb drive. I’d suggest this tool if you’re on Windows or macOS:
Also, how are you flashing the Roon OS installation image to your thumb drive? Are you using belenaEtcher or something else? I would have expected an old boot block to be wiped out during the flashing process.
Sorry about the confusion, this is about booting the installer image on a USB stick. I’m on a Mac, have tried the Raspberry Image Installer and Balena Etcher. Will try to reformat as well as to source a new USB stick next and retry.
Tried a brand new SanDisk USB stick with the “roonbox-linuxx64-nuc4-usb-factoryreset.img.gz” installer image via Etcher, unfortunately nothing changed, hangs after “Welcome to GRUB!”.
Neither Shift or ESC opens the grub menu to have a look at what is going on, any idea how to get into the grub menu?
I would take a very close look at the Bios settings for your NUC, and make sure they are set to the latest recommendations from roon, i.e. UEFI Boot enabled and secure boot disabled.
The NUC is fine, i had a look at the installer configuration and the problem seems to be the “insmod efi_gop” line grub is doing as first item. The supplied efi_gop does not seem to support the NUCs graphics hardware so it starts booting in blind mode.
It would be nice if the efi_gop can be extended to also support the NUC8i7H* graphics variants, the Ubuntu efi_gop does this quite nicely so maybe that one could be supplied in the installer.
Yes, see the first two lines of my first post. Extending efi_gop would also support this NUC, so it would be nice if this could be added in the future, as example by using efi_gop from the Ubunti dist.
