Booting from USB on Dell R520

[Jeremy Wilson]

The last thread I saw on this topic was two years old, so I was hoping someone might have figured this issue out.

I've tried booting a known-good USB key from the front, back and internal USB connectors, and the machine sees the device as "PRAM", but it claims its an invalid boot image.

I've tried other images besides FreeNAS such as Linux and they don't work either, so I'm assuming it's a Dell issue.

Anyone figure out the magic combination of BIOS settings to get this to work? I'd hate to have to boot from CD and write configs to USB. It's a bit janky.

 

[joeschmuck]

If you are unable to boot from USB, you could boot from a small internal hard drive. Unfortunately that is a waste of space but it could be the only option you have.

I also don't understand why a USB drive would be considered PRAM.

How are you creating the USB flash drive? Also have you tried to boot that flash drive in any other computer? It won't cause any harm if you do, just don't start setting up drives, see if it will boot. When you say it won't boot, what kind of message do you get?

 

[Jeremy Wilson]

I've tried booting it in other Dells without issue. I'm using dd to create it.

It just says invalid boot image.

 

[joeschmuck]

Well if it boots in another machine then I'm not sure where to go from here. If it didn't boot I would say to create it from a bootable CD of FreeNAS as that works perfectly. If you plan to use that Dell computer then you may be stuck with using an internal hard drive to boot from.

 

[Jeremy Wilson]

How will FreeNAS store my config with no writable boot drive?

 

[Dusan]

How will FreeNAS store my config with no writable boot drive?

A small part of it (a 20 MB partition) is writable and stores the config.

 

[joeschmuck]

The posting above made me think of something... The USB flash drive isn't write protected nor is it an encrypted flash driver, right? It's just a simple plain USB flash drive.

 

[Jeremy Wilson]

Yes, it's just a flash drive, to which I copy the FreeNAS ISO image. I'm on a Mac. Here's the commands I use to create it:

hdiutil convert -format UDRW -o /path/to/target.img /path/to/source.iso
diskutil unmountDisk /dev/disk1
sudo dd if=/path/to/target.img of=/dev/rdisk1 bs=1024

 

[joeschmuck]

I don't know if what you are doing is correct however I'd just make the bootable CD from the FreeNAS ISO and make it that way. You would save a lot of time.

 

[Renato Ornelas]

Hi,

I managed to install on a USB drive, see http://forums.freenas.org/index.php?threads/howto-install-freenas-on-dell-r520.23390/