11.2 upgrade resulted in non-booting system

[mikesm]

Folks, I upgraded fine on my Supermicro X9DR7-TF+ system from 11.1 to 11.2U1 and it worked fine. Then while I was away from the house, there was an extended powerfailure and the UPS brought the the system down fine. When the power came back on, the system failed to boot.

I thought the problem was the USB stick I booted from was damaged, and swapped it. I cloned the drive the drive properly to a Samsung FIT, but it booted with the same issue. I then went to an installation media on USB from the 11.2 ISO, which booted fine. I installed 11.2 on the FIT just fine using the normal parameters, but it also wouldn't boot with the same error.

After reading the forums, I tried doing a UEFI install on the FIT, and then changing the motherboard to UEFI (which took a bit of time - the old MB wasn't optimized for UEFI booting), then it came up fine.

However, after the original successful upgrade, I deleted the backup I had made from 11.1, so didn't have a valid backup to reconfigure 11.2 to. It took a while, but I got the config more or less back. I can't seem to get the APC ups to talk to 11.2 properly over a serial connection, but the configuration was pretty simple, so getting things back wasn't too painful.

Comments: Why did the system boot successfully after the upgrade, but fail a month later after the powerfailure? It would normally have run for months before reboots in the normal course of affairs.

Is is there better way of migrating from grub to the freebsd boot system that would not have required UEFI? This was quite surprising behavior.

Is there a way to recover the old system config from the original boot drive so I can restore it?

Thanks
Mike

 

[ikke]

FreeBSD bootloader is not working with older BIOSes or HW, like mine too. I went through the same, and am now stuck with last grub version.

Here's how you can recover your config from old boot device: https://forums.freenas.org/threads/no-boot-after-11-2-upgrade.72615/post-503895

 

[ikke]

Any chance you could try the version linked in here and provide feedback to the issue? https://redmine.ixsystems.com/issues/65517#note-22

 

[Jailer]

Why did the system boot successfully after the upgrade, but fail a month later after the powerfailure?

Because USB sticks are extremely unreliable. It's not uncommon at all for them to spontaneously fail. I've recommended to others that boot from USB to reboot the server before performing an upgrade for this very reason.

Is is there better way of migrating from grub to the freebsd boot system that would not have required UEFI?

There shouldn't have been any issue and if you did have it should have been reported as a bug.

Is there a way to recover the old system config from the original boot drive so I can restore it?

First and formost, make sure you have a good copy saved to a safe place. Second if you haven't done that it is located on your pool in /var/db/system/config long file hash number and can be recovered once your pool is mounted.

 

[ikke]

Mike, I feel you. I was stunned also. My system also booted *once* to 11.2 after upgrade from 11.1. I have no clue what happened there, but I was on 11.2 until first reboot. I never managed to get back there. I know it sounds odd. Like if the grub would have done the last favor.

 

[bluonek]

Just FYI - I also had the same experience except I was not using GRUB (using UEFI) and did not deal with a power failure and have a relatively modern machine (ThinkServer TS140).

Attached is what my system boots to after first reboot after upgraded to 11.2 u2. For shlts and giggles I did a re-install, re-apply saved settings, and attempted to reboot again - same issue - same screenshot.

Any ideas? I upgraded from 11.1, was there something new being done with the bootloader for 11.2?

 

[bluonek]

UPDATE: After going to 11.1-U7 all these issues go away.

- Back to using UEFI - no problem
- Back to primary NIC *not disappearing after unlocking ZFS storage pool

 

[bluonek]

Did anyone with this issue try 11.2 U3 yet?

 

[ikke]

I believe it slipped the release. I didn't see it in release note.

 

[jonmayer]

FreeNAS 11.2 U5 - still cannot boot with TS140. It would be nice if we could choose to use grub while this can be worked out.