Mining / HiveOS

Install HiveOS on an NVMe Drive

A USB 3.0 stick is the cheap and normal way to boot HiveOS. If you already have an NVMe drive sitting in a drawer, it works too and costs you nothing. There is one BIOS setting that decides whether it also costs you a GPU.

Set the M.2 controller to SATA mode first

This is the part worth knowing before you start.

On a lot of boards the M.2 slot shares PCIe lanes with the expansion slots.

Populate it and the board takes those lanes back from your GPU slots.

The symptom is cards going missing. You boot the rig and it detects five GPUs instead of six.

Set the M.2 controller to SATA mode in the BIOS and the lanes go back to the GPUs.

You lose NVMe speed. HiveOS does not care. It is not a workload that touches the disk hard.

If GPUs disappear after you switch to an NVMe boot drive, go to the BIOS before you touch a riser. A missing card reads exactly like a dead riser or a bad cable, and people replace hardware over this. Check the M.2 mode first. It costs nothing to rule out.

What you need to flash it

You need to write the image from another machine, so you need an external NVMe enclosure or dock.

Fit the drive into the enclosure and plug it into the machine you are flashing from.

Get the image

Download the current stable HiveOS image.

https://hiveos.farm/

The base stable image already supports every GPU currently on sale. Take that one unless you have a reason not to.

Use the torrent rather than the zip. It finishes noticeably faster.

Download Balena Etcher and install it.

https://etcher.balena.io/

Write the drive

Open Etcher.

Click Flash from file and select the HiveOS image.

Click Select target and choose the NVMe drive in its enclosure.

Etcher warns you the drive is unusually large. That is expected here. Continue.

Click Flash and accept the UAC prompt.

Let it finish writing and validating.

Add your farm hash before you install the drive

Unplug the drive and plug it back in. Windows will not browse it until you do.

Open the drive and find the rig config example file.

Right click it and edit it.

Log into HiveOS in a browser and open your settings.

Copy your farm hash to the clipboard.

Paste it into the config file inside quotes.

Name the worker something you will recognise in the farm list.

Save the file as rig.conf

Reopen rig.conf and read it back before you shut the lid. Save As in Notepad will happily give you rig.conf.txt, and a rig that boots with no farm hash just sits there unclaimed while you go looking for a network fault. Confirm the hash and the worker name are both in the file you actually saved.

Install and boot

Take the drive out of the enclosure.

Fit it to the M.2 slot on the rig.

Boot the machine.

It comes up exactly as it would from a USB stick and registers against your farm.

Assign a flight sheet and it starts work.