ISO appliance doesn't boot

[molasses2]

I'm totally new to Zabbix, so I may be misunderstanding something very fundamental. My understanding of an appliance is that it's a bootable image ready to be installed on hardware. I downloaded zabbix_appliance-6.2.1-netinstall.iso and burned it onto a flash drive with Balena Etcher, and the first thing I saw was Etcher saying that wasn't a bootable image.


I downloaded the .iso twice, and see no errors. Am I missing something obvious?

[molasses2]

Thank you for the reply!

TL;DR version: I had to install it as an MBR image using Rufus. It absolutely would not work as UEFI.

Gory details:

I left out the backstory where I initially used Ventoy as my bootdisk and copied the Zabbix .iso onto that (by the way, I only tested with zabbix_appliance-6.2.1-netinstall.iso). I got as far as the Alma Linux installer, but then saw some errors (details farther down), which drove me to try Etcher.

I read the Etcher documentation, but I think the essence of my original post is worth some deeper consideration to the Zabbix documentation writers and/or image maintainers. The Etcher docs say...

Etcher copies images to drives byte by byte, without doing any transformation to the final device, which means images that require special treatment to be made bootable, like Windows images, will not work out of the box. In these cases, the general advice is to use software specific to those kind of images, usually available from the image publishers themselves.

It specifically says that non-bootable images, or any that need special treatment, should come from the publisher - in this case Zabbix. So I'm back to wondering how anyone is supposed to know that the Zabbix .iso needs special treatment, when it isn't called out. I'm also curious what tools others use, if anyone wants to suggest a better one.

Back to my adventures, for attempt number 3, I booted Windows and used Rufus to create a bootable USB drive, initially as a GPT/UEFI image. I got exactly the same behavior as previously with Ventoy, namely, the drive does boot and offers to Install Alma Linux 8.6, but choosing that option give me:

error: ../../grub-core/fs/fshelp.c:258:file `/images/pxeboot/vmlinuz' not found.
error: ../../grub-core/loader/i386/efi/linux.c:207:you need to load the kernel first.

Finally, in frustration, I switched to DOS/MBR, and actually got the installer to function.

So, a parting question: Is there a bug in how the installer handles UEFI, or is it just silently understood by all appliance users that you must use MBR?

[Atsushi]

Please read Etcher's documentation.

https://github.com/balena-io/etcher/blob/master/docs/USER-DOCUMENTATION.md#why-is-my-drive-not-bootable

Try another tool.

[molasses2]

Thank you for the reply!

TL;DR version: I had to install it as an MBR image using Rufus. It absolutely would not work as UEFI.

Gory details:

I left out the backstory where I initially used Ventoy as my bootdisk and copied the Zabbix .iso onto that (by the way, I only tested with zabbix_appliance-6.2.1-netinstall.iso). I got as far as the Alma Linux installer, but then saw some errors (details farther down), which drove me to try Etcher.

I read the Etcher documentation, but I think the essence of my original post is worth some deeper consideration to the Zabbix documentation writers and/or image maintainers. The Etcher docs say...

Etcher copies images to drives byte by byte, without doing any transformation to the final device, which means images that require special treatment to be made bootable, like Windows images, will not work out of the box. In these cases, the general advice is to use software specific to those kind of images, usually available from the image publishers themselves.

It specifically says that non-bootable images, or any that need special treatment, should come from the publisher - in this case Zabbix. So I'm back to wondering how anyone is supposed to know that the Zabbix .iso needs special treatment, when it isn't called out. I'm also curious what tools others use, if anyone wants to suggest a better one.

Back to my adventures, for attempt number 3, I booted Windows and used Rufus to create a bootable USB drive, initially as a GPT/UEFI image. I got exactly the same behavior as previously with Ventoy, namely, the drive does boot and offers to Install Alma Linux 8.6, but choosing that option give me:

error: ../../grub-core/fs/fshelp.c:258:file `/images/pxeboot/vmlinuz' not found.
error: ../../grub-core/loader/i386/efi/linux.c:207:you need to load the kernel first.

Finally, in frustration, I switched to DOS/MBR, and actually got the installer to function.

So, a parting question: Is there a bug in how the installer handles UEFI, or is it just silently understood by all appliance users that you must use MBR?