CentOS 7 ESXi/VMware Hang on Boot

I installed CentoOS 7.0 1406 on a VMWare ESXi 5.5 hypervisor. I installed "Sever with GUI" and selected KDE. However on boot I get the following messages in under a second, before the process tops (waited 15 mins, multiple times):

sd 0:0:0:0: [sda] Assuming drive cache: write through
sd 0:0:0:0: [sda] Assuming drive cache: write through
sd 0:0:0:0: [sda] Assuming drive cache: write through

With a flashing "_" but no ability to provide input.

The drive is encrypted. I do not know if CentOS's drive encryption would affect this (I haven't been given the ability to enter the phrase to decrypt the drive yet)

I tried reinstalling it from scratch, same error messages. I have a Windows 2012 server running on the hypervisor with no issues. I Googled around, and this doesn't appear to be an issue with CentOS in general, so I imagine it's some way that I configured my virtual machine, or installed the OS.

I'm running on 2 GB of RAM and 1 virtual core. I tried booting up with removing the vm's access to the network, and this changed nothing.

What is the issue?
What can I do to troubleshoot the current install/virtual machine?
How could I resetup the virtual machine, and reinstall the OS to avoid this issue in the future?

Ranger

Posted 2014-11-16T19:52:35.957

Reputation: 623

Answers

At the GRUB boot menu, press e to edit the boot config and remove rhgb.

Edit: You can disable it permanently by removing rhgb in /etc/default/grub and execute grub2-mkconfig -o /boot/grub2/grub.cfg to update your boot grub.cfg.

laapsaap

Posted 2014-11-16T19:52:35.957

Reputation: 86

1Can you explain why this works? I find it only happens when running disk encryption. – blacklight – 2015-04-12T01:04:22.003

1plymouth isnt working correctly, its supposed to give you a gui where you can enter a password instead of a blank screen. So by disabling rhgb (redhat graphical boot) you get an alternative way of entering your password. – laapsaap – 2015-04-15T22:20:30.080

hi, any idea what command that i should type in grub> prompt? sorry i'm newbie to centos here *i'm using centos 7 – AnD – 2015-11-06T01:38:44.270

At the grub prompt, hi 'e' to edit the parameters. Remove rhgb quiet from the kernel parameters. It's a known bug.

user431040

Posted 2014-11-16T19:52:35.957

Reputation: 11

Download a newer version of the CentOS installation media and re-install. This problem seems to affect CentOS 7 systems from 2014. I experienced this problem installing a system from CentOS-7.0-1406-x86_64-Minimal.iso. I downloaded the latest ISO (which is CentOS-7-x86_64-Minimal-1511.iso as of this writing) and the problem disappeared. The server was able to mount encrypted volumes on boot.

Craig Finch

Posted 2014-11-16T19:52:35.957

Reputation: 123

So I tried doing a fresh install without drive encryption and it appears to be working just fine.

Ranger

Posted 2014-11-16T19:52:35.957

Reputation: 623