Dell Poweredge R720XD initial boot truenas12 issues

[Matt Rupert]

Hello Dan, Ron and John,

So I do not see the the installed HDs after the system posts. I reran the TrueNas12 installer and I was able to see the drives there.

For my clarification, if I see HDs in the post that means the H710 card has its firmware in it for running raid. In this case the TN installer will not be able to access those drives. This also means the H710 is not in IT mode. Conversely if I do not see the drives at POST the H710 is in IT mode, and TN will be able to see those drives and access them.

So the Bios rom that we are talking about is what is flashed to IT mode for TrueNas be able to use this raid(IT mode) card. Is that correct?

So the NVMe to USB Adapter I ordered is that from amazon. It should show up tomorrow or the next day so Ill give it a shot as soon as it gets here. Im guessing the internal USB port is USB2 speeds. Im have been reluctant to use a usb flash disk as a boot drive as I have read they are not terribly reliable Im hoping that the reliability warnings are more for the memory on those usb disks and less so the interface and connectors.

Back to the SATA ports on the MB being disable. Would disconnecting the front back plane from the rear back plane pcb and disconnecting the rear back planes power cabling maybe reenable those sata ports? I ask cause the R720 server that has the 8 drive bays has those sata connectors working for things like the cdrom and such that are front facing. They use the same MB. What else on the MB or what is plugged in that is different that is disabling those satas? Anyone have any ideas how to get those two satas reenabled? There has to be jumpers or something cause there are no bios things I have been able to find that can switch them off or on. Makes me think its in the hardware when rear back plane is plugged in.

Thank you guys for all your help and just listening.
Matt

 

[M H]

I'm sorry if this has been mentioned, but I see an internal USB port on the lower left hand corner of the photo you posted. Why don't you just put a USB stick in there and run the OS from that? Then you can use all your other drives as you see fit.

I also use Dell R530 servers and they have an internal USB post right in the middle of the motherboard. I use that to boot my systems when I need to test something. I use one of these usb sticks that fit pretty much everywhere. You will however need to enable the USB port in the BIOS before you can use it, at least in my case. Also make sure you move the system dataset elsewhere or you'll kill the USB stick pretty fast from all the writes.

Otherwise, I use the Dell IDSDM for the TrueNAS OS. Works great for me and I have the redundancy I need. Once a year or so, I'll swap one of the SD cards out and have it auto rebuild from the other to prevent aging of the cards, but that's my OCD, I've never had them actually fail.

 

[Dan Tudora]

hello
maybe for flashing LSI card help that https://fohdeesha.com/docs/perc/

hello
and about USB
USB2 is good
USB3 is not
FreeBSD have some trouble with USB3

 

[Ericloewe]

USB2 is good
USB3 is not
FreeBSD have some trouble with USB3

Source? This was an issue many years ago, but everything was resolved in FreeNAS 9.10, as far as I know.

 

[Dan Tudora]

source ??
memories !!
I start with FN 8

 

[Ericloewe]

Yeah, well... Unless you have specific examples, it's purely speculation. USB 3.0 is fine (although some USB 3.0 flash drives were known to overheat, that does not seem to be particularly relevant here).

 

[Matt Rupert]

Hello MH,

Yeah that is going to be my fallback solution and boot from that internal usb. Hopefully with the NVMe to usb controller I linked in one of the above messages. Im frustrated I have a NVMe and going to boot it through a usb interface. I was trying so hard to avoid booting through usb. All that I had read about TrueNas/FreeNas was to avoid the usb thumb disks and install a small ssd. So far 120g samsung ssd, shelved, and possibly a PCIe to NVMe/ssd shelved. Hopefully this new usb/NVMe will work, but oh the USB interface drive me nuts on a NVMe. Fingers crossed if that is the final solution, at least once its up and running the usb wont be a bottle neck.

Thank you for your response MH!
Matt

 

[Ericloewe]

USB is fine, it's USB flash drives that are a problem.

 

[Matt Rupert]

Hello EricLoewe,

That is good to know. Thank you.

So that NVMe to usb drive will hopefully show up today and Ill give that a shot.
I had no idea this old Dell server would be such a pain in the ass trying to get it to boot. The converting the H710 raid card to IT mode was a piece of cake with the directions on the help pages. I thought that was going to be the real issue, but no. Hopefully this will be the last of my troubles with this machine. I have another one that will be a clone of this machine so it will go smother once I have this running I hope.

Thanks again for your response.
Matt

 

[JohnDigital]

Consider using several USB flash drives in a boot pool with absurd amount of parity. 2-3-4 disk mirror, z2, z3, then repurpose that m.2/ssd in a system dataset and or jail pool.

 

[Dan Tudora]

Consider using several USB flash drives in a boot pool with absurd amount of parity. 2-3-4 disk mirror

hello
absurd YES
look like a christmas tree setup
is for that season (with that a lot of led of USB stick)
WHY not with a just USB to SATA/M2 thing
JUST one
and with https://www.truenas.com/community/t...ification-and-backup-the-config.27365/page-41
you can have a config daily/weekly, just make a cron job for that
you can have a smart daily/weekly, just make a cron job for that
and DO NOT forget to say LIKE/THANKS to @Spearfoot for that

 

[Ericloewe]

Consider using several USB flash drives in a boot pool with absurd amount of parity. 2-3-4 disk mirror, z2, z3, then repurpose that m.2/ssd in a system dataset and or jail pool.

At some point, doing things "right" is cheaper and easier. Quad flash drives are past that point.

 

[Matt Rupert]

So I have finally found a combination of USB NVMe to usbs that work and will boot the server. I have a new NVMe on order that Ill attempt to get this to work via the PCIe card. If that does not work I have what is working now as a last stand. Also I have found out the Poweredge R720s the have the OEM-R firmware have the internal sata ports crippled as was pointed out earlier. The standard bios versions of the motherboards do not have this limitation. Im working with Savemyserver.com to replace the motherboards with standard versions. With any luck this will open a few more possibilities for going though the sata interfaces. We will see. Thank you for all the help to all of you who responded to my posts.
Matt