SOLVED Boot into 11.1-U4 > Mountroot error 2

[TigerXtrm]

I've been trying on and off for months to get this to work, but I keep running into the same problem. I run the update from 11.0-U4 > 11.1-U4 and it always runs itself into a wall with a mountroot error 2.

I've tried reapplying the update, I've tried doing it manually, I've tried editing tuneables during boot. Nothing works. I can go back to 11.0 no problem, that all works without a hitch. So what makes 11.1 different that it isn't able to find the boot drive (from what I can tell, anyway)? Anyone able to help me out with this?

 

[dlavigne]

Have you tried installing 11.1-U4 to a new boot device? If that works, you can restore your config.

 

[TigerXtrm]

Have you tried installing 11.1-U4 to a new boot device? If that works, you can restore your config.

I haven't yet, because if that doesn't work I can't easily go back without fully reinstalling 11.0, not to mention reconfiguring jails and all that jazz. It's on my list of things to try as a last ditch effort when I have time, but I hoped there would be a simpler solution.

 

[dlavigne]

You'd still have your original boot device to fall back to, but this would rule out whether or not the boot device itself has issues (which is a common cause for that error).

 

[TigerXtrm]

Finally had some time to do some more work on this. I've tried a new boot device, an old SSD I had laying around. Installed FreeNAS 11.1 on it from USB stick which all seemed to work fine. But then on first boot the exact same issue occurred. So the problem is not in the boot media, it's somewhere else in the existing hardware. Any other ideas? My hardware list can be found in this thread: https://forums.freenas.org/index.php?threads/first-freenas-build-a-pre-flight-check.42174/

 

[TigerXtrm]

For the sake of possibly helping someone else with this problem in the future, I finally found what the problem was in my particular case.

So in my original build, linked above, I mentioned that I would be using a SATA expansion card for the boot drive and a scratch disk. This was just some cheapo card with two extra SATA slots which I needed because all the SATA ports on the board were filled with data drives.

I can't be a 100% certain what exactly happens, but in relation to this thread I can make a good guess. I'm assuming the expansion card gets recognized during boot just fine, but somewhere during FreeNAS' bootloader taking over the expansion card probably falls off the map and can't make it back in time. Oddly this only happened with 11.1 and higher versions. It has run this way on 9.x for ages, including upgrades and all that.

Whatever the case, today I had a spark of genius and got a USB to SATA cable, and hooked the SSD with the OS up that way. Voila, it booted beautifully the first time. So something about the expansion card was causing trouble, though I can't say for certain what. The scratch disk is still attached and is recognized once the system is booted.

Edit: Actually, scratch that (ha). The scratch disk pool is actually missing in 11.2, so now I'm fairly confident that 11.x just doesn't recognize the card anymore for some reason. Gonna put the scratch disk in an external case, hook it up with USB and take the expansion card out all together. Be done with this mess.

Either way, case closed after, oh, 7 months.