Can't get into install

[ehcorn]

Hi all, I've been trying to install freenas for a while now, I had the installer working this morning, but I'm beginning to think I've corrupted something.

I've tried 6 different thumb drives now, and writing each with Rufus, when that didnt work I tried win32diskimager, then UniversalUSBInstaller, then imgburn, then I tried booting to linux and making a boot disk via dd, which also didn't work. For the drives I formatted in window it always stopped at the same point, the error read "Mounting from cd9660:iso9660/FREENAS failed with error 2: retrying in 180 more seconds" when when I just let it run it brought me to a strange shell I don't recognize with no discernible commands. I'm assuming this shell is what's trying to mount the ISO but I have no idea how to use it. The linux dd made drives work better initially, the server sees them as UEFI devices rather than just a USB disk, and runs at higher resolution which initially filled me with hope! But if I boot to the installer, it gets to the EFI framebuffer information bit, lists off my display resolution, and spits out some hex code for masks and just stops.

I'm trying to run freenas on an Acer AC100, it's a small windows home server style system from a few years back, if I try to run a live distro for linux it works just fine and like I said, I had the freenas installer working last night but I forgot to put in a boot disk to install it to, rebooted, and have never been able to get back there since.

I'm currently zero'ing out the drive I had the most success with in an attempt to start fresh, but does anyone else have suggestions I can try?

 

[ThreeDee]

do you have another computer with a cd/dvd drive and burn iso to cd or dvd and then install onto whatever media?

 

[Basil Hendroff]

You do realise you need two thumb drives - the first for the installer (what you create with Rufus) and the second for the boot disk containing FreeNAS that is created using the installer https://www.ixsystems.com/documentation/freenas/11.2/install.html#preparing-the-media

 

[ehcorn]

I sadly don't own any computers with a disk drive, though I think that would be the best option here.

And Yes, Seymour, I do realize I need two different drives. my problem is that I couldn't get the system to boot to the installer. I ended up just booting into the installer via virtualbox, then making a disk for the server that way. Currently it seems like it's working.