DIY Nodes Guide

Great! Good to know that it works with the CD BIOS (not UEFI) ISO image.

What I am saying is, if you want to boot with a USB key instead of the CD, it should work with the option I showed you on the comment above, now that we know you can boot with CD ISO.

The zero-os image of the CD/DVD ISO option is the same as the USB image just below on bootstrap.grid.tf. One is in CD format, the other USB format, but the file is the same.

So if you want to, try it with the USB option.

But otherwise, if your node is working with the CD bootable image, that’s perfect as is.

Happy farming @thomas3node !

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Hey Thomas,

let me give you another hint. @Mik allready pointed out that your server is capable of running zero-os since you successfully booted from CD/DVD. So it must be possible to boot from USB either. I assume you managed to create the bootable usb device with the bootstrap image correctly. Now you need to get your server to boot from it. I assume that you didn’t get that far because your server got stuck in PXE-boot loop.

You need to take a look at your BIOS once again and check boot settings.
If you have updated to latest BIOS (2.9.0) it should be just about looking like this:

image

Now uncheck / disable all NICs (red square) in order to avoid PXE booting. You also migth want to disable other devices that you won’t need (like virtual floppy drive and/or virtual optical drive). Make sure that the USB device that contains the bootstrap image is checked (green square).

Most important: Scroll down (!!!) to see the actual boot sequence. That would look like this:

image

What you can see here is that the USB device is in last place of boot priority. This has to be changed! To do so click on “Hard-Disk Drive Sequence” and get the usb drive in first row.

image

Keep in mind that when you detach the CD/DVD-drive and put another SSD/HDD drive in there you need to doublecheck the boot settings once again. This “newly” attached drive migth get into first position in boot sequence.

Give it a try and let us know if it works!

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Pro tip. Your boot usb won’t show in bios boot options unless it already connected. I wasn’t able to boot on some dells until I figured that out.

Edit: I am not a pro

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Hi,
Does zero OS require a bare-metal system? I have an alienware that is being used but highly underutilized. A beefy CPU, 28 GB of RAM (32 total) and 40 TB of iSCI NAS disk are all just setting there doing nothing (Yes 40 TeraBytes of free space; I finally quite wasting my time and patience on Chia). The device still mines ETH (for now) and I am not ready to give that up. Can the two operations life in harmony (TFT farming with zOS and ETH miner)?

SS

No it is bare metal only. A lot of us here moved out capacity over to TF. I would build a small cheap rig to continue with your eth mining. Note, you will probably need more RAM.

I was thinking that would be the case. Well, on the bright side (or dark depending on ones position) ETH mining should be coming to an end any time now. You know, like another 7 months to 38 years. LOL. I have a MSI thunderclap or lightening Noise3 (something like that) which took a fall off the balcony. Maybe I’ll hot glue that together and mine ETH with two cards there and use the alien rig + qnap (isci) for TFT… I think I have some more sticks of G"o Fast plastics" (RAM) of the same speed. hmmm

Since this thread is what the homepage links to when you follow the links for DIY its important we keep it fresh. The wiki link to the reward calculator is dead, but should probably go to the simulator anyways. Adding a link to the FAQ would be helpful as well.

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Some important things to note, with 40tb of HDD you will need a gigabit connection to make that capacity useful to the network. They also cannot be USB drives, so you may have some shucking to do.

Thanks for pointing this out. I have updated all the links in this post :slight_smile:

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