Changed motherboard, TrueNAS doesn't boot, stuck in EFI Shell

[chrisada]

Before the attempted change, my system is:

• Xeon E3-1231 on ASRock E3C226D2I board
• single SSD boot drive
• 2x480GB mirrored SSD vdev
• 5x3TB RAIDZ2 vdev

Edit: I was running TrueNAS 12.0-U5.1

I had moved all the drives (8 in total) onto Supermicro A2SDI-H-TFM, expecting it to be a smooth transition.

All the drives are visible in BIOS, but the new system would not boot into the old boot drive. (Boot SSD is connected to on-board SATA port, if it makes a difference)

The boot drive does not even show up as boot option. And the system would boot into EFI Shell, where, again, all the drives are detected. It would really help me if anyone can point me to what I can do.

What I have tried so far:

• Disable Fast Boot
• Switch boot drive to different SATA port
• Change boot mode from UEFI to LEGACY or DUAL
• Restore optimized results

None of those make a difference. The boot drive still does not show up as boot option, and the system boot into EFI Shell.

It would really help me if anyone can point me to what I can do. Thanks!

I do have the config saved, so if re-installing will work that is an option for me. I haven't tried that yet, as I'm not sure if that is where the problem is or not.

 

[Ericloewe]

I do have the config saved, so if re-installing will work that is an option for me.

Yes, that may be the pragmatic solution here, although your problem is a little weird. I assume you've configured the boot device priorities to put the boot drive at the top?

 

[chrisada]

Yes, that may be the pragmatic solution here, although your problem is a little weird. I assume you've configured the boot device priorities to put the boot drive at the top?

Yes, I put UEFI Hard Disk on top. But it doesn't show up in the boot menu.

I have actually tried booting from TrueNAS installer USB stick, and the installer can see all the disks. I am just wary of making the situation worse trying to re-install, if the problem is actually somewhere else...

 

[Ericloewe]

I have actually tried booting from TrueNAS installer USB stick, and the installer can see all the disks. I am just wary of making the situation worse trying to re-install, if the problem is actually somewhere else...

If you don't overwrite a data disk, the worst thing that can happen is that you need to re-reinstall, or something like that.

 

[chrisada]

If you don't overwrite a data disk, the worst thing that can happen is that you need to re-reinstall, or something like that.

Thank you for the affirmation, Eric.

I just re-installed, and am now back in business!

It must have been something to do with UEFI/BIOS. The original install was from 2015, and I may have forgot how it was actually set up.

I want to note that I didn't even have to load my config. The re-install process offered to keep my config, even while formatting the disk. That was quite amazing!

 

[Ericloewe]

Between UEFI being a bit weird (at least BIOS had the excuse of just being the basic ROM for this one computer model that sort of grew to support an entire industry) and AMI's craptastic firmware, I'm not even surprised.
Maybe it wasn't scanning for UEFI executables that it could load and had to be clued in during the installation process?