Another USB boot issue

[Quadgnim]

Sorry, I know you all hate this, but yes, I'm also having an issue booting from USB. Let me provide some background:

1. Was running 8.x from USB for at least a year. on a physical machine
2. Started running iSCSI to ESX 5.1 and since then I've been experiencing freezes where I needed to power cycle the FreeNAS machine.
3. I tried flashing my BIOS to see it fixed the problem but it didn't. After flashing I had some issues booting but got it resolved.
4. Decided to upgrade my FreeNAS version to the latest 9.x
5. Downloaded the AMD 64 bit img to a MAC, uncompressed then used dd to re-image my boot stick.
- first mistake, I should have used a new stick as now I'm dead in the water
- the stick is a 4gig stick
- I've tried another 4gig stick and a 2gig stick all with the same two results
---- Something seems odd, after imaging the stick, if I put it back into the MAC or a PC/Windows I get an error that the stick is unreadable and prompted to reformat. Is this expected behavior?
---- Also, prior to imaging the stick I've tried formatting for both 32bit FAT and 16bit FAT
6. result 1 is the repeating #'s that others have talked about
7. result 2 is where it seems to get past the bios and recognizes the usb as a boot option, but just hangs, no errors, no #'s, nothing.
8. I've gone back and tried the 32 bit image, and the 8.3 image. All with the same results
9. I've explicitly changed the USB to HDD and auto, same results
10. I've messed with other BIOS settings, but can't seem to pinpoint the one thats the issue (if its even a bios issue)

Technical details of my environment:

Motherboard / Biostar - A780L3C
-- Bios - AMI, -- just upgraded to 78LKP410
CPU - AMD Athlon II X3 450 1.6 GHZ
Corsair memory, 8 gig

Any suggestions would be greatly appreciated.

Larry

 

[Quadgnim]

I just thought I'd throw it out there. I ended up downloading the iso, and using VMware Fusion for the MAC to boot the ISO to a VM. You create an empty VM with no hard drive, then attach a USB stick, and install the ISO to the USB. After doing so the USB stick now boots, but the img files wouldn't. I don't know if it's an issue with the uncompress utility on the MAC "Keka" or what, but this method seems to have resolved the problem.