pschatz100
Guru
- Joined
- Mar 30, 2014
- Messages
- 1,184
Of course, I could have bunk USB sticks, but I've been through 4 of them. Admittedly, they were all the same size/brand, however.
They're Microcenter-branded 32GB USB 3.0 sticks. Some newish, some oldish. They all work like a champ booting up Linux and Windows install ISOs. So, I guess there's a corner case of the chipset these specific USB sticks are using not playing nice with FreeBSD... but even still, they played nice in 11.1-* and prior.
According to the changelog for 11.2-RELEASE, the boot process was changed - so there could definitely be an issue with thumbdrives. If I were you, I would try two things: 1) try re-creating the boot drive while it is plugged into a usb2 port. Don't create mirrored boot drives - just create a single drive and see if that makes any difference, and 2) try a different brand thumbdrive (a different drive will have a different controller).
When I used to boot off of USB flash drives, I always used Sandisk thumbdrives. Often, one went bad when I tried to update FreeNAS. Sometimes, I could take the bad thumbdrive and reformat it for windows - but usually not. After I switched to booting off a small SSD, all these issues went away. I did not look into the matter any further once I started using an SSD for boot.