FreeNAS ISO is not recognized by Ubuntu

[vduvanenko]

I downloaded FreeNAS 11.2-U5 ISO to Ubuntu 18.04 and tried to use StartupDiskCreator built-in application that turns ISO's into USB bootable images and burns USB sticks. However, this app didn't recognize the ISO and provided no errors, just staring blankly back. I then ran the app on command line, and it returned "isoinfo: Unable to find Joliet SVD" twice and then exited.
I was able to create a bootable USB stick by using the belena... application on the Mac.

 

[sretalla]

I suspect using the dd command as suggested in the documentation would be the correct option for linux builds.

https://www.ixsystems.com/documentation/freenas/11.2-U5/install.html#on-freebsd-or-linux

 

[vduvanenko]

Sadly, the dd command failed with an error "dd: error writing 'dev/sda2': No space left on device".
This device has FreeNAS ISO installed from the Mac installation, but shows 8 GB of free space, and two FreeNAS partitions.
Could you possibly provide instructions on how to format a USB drive properly (possibly FAT32) so that the dd command will work with that partitioning and formatting?

 

[sretalla]

I'm certainly no linux expert, but I think sda2 is partition 2 on device sda... you need to dd to the device, so just /dev/sda

You may need to unmount partitions for that to be OK... also sudo.

EDIT: just re-read the instructions and it turns out I'm not as wrong as I thought:
On Linux, use /dev/sdX, where X refers to the letter of the USB device.

Also... you might want to think carefully about writing to sda in particular, since I think that's usually the first disk in a linux box... not the best one to write to. perhaps look at a df to see where the right sized partition is.

 

[Fredda]

Sadly, the dd command failed with an error "dd: error writing 'dev/sda2': No space left on device".

You have to use the device. /dev/sda is the device, /dev/sda1 or /dev/sda2 is a partition on the device.

Code:

sudo dd if=freenas.iso of=/dev/sda bs=1M status=progress

The status option is optional and might not be supported by older versions of dd.
Make sure /dev/sda is really your USB device and you don't kill your system device by accident.

 

[sretalla]

sudo dd if=freenas.iso of=/dev/sda bs=1M status=progress

The documentation suggests bs=64k

 

[Fredda]

The documentation suggests bs=64k

I don't think this really matters. Typical suggestions are the blocksize should be a multiple of the
drives sector size.

They are for sure both faster as the default bs of 512b but I doubt, you'll see a significant difference
for bs=64k or bs=1M. But for the FreeNAS iso the bs value probably does not matter anyway as the
iso is quite small.

Tuning the blocksize might come in handy if you backup a drive with dd.

 

[vduvanenko]

Code:

sudo dd if=FreeNAS-11.2-U5.iso of=/dev/sda bs=64k status=progress

The above command worked beautifully! It wrote 602 MB at 4.2 MB/sec and took 144 seconds. Thank you for your help.
I also deleted both sda1 and sda2 partitions using Ubuntu's Disk application, and then used the above command to see if
dd puts these partitions back and it did. Then installation of FreeNAS from the created USB stick worked flawlessly.
It would be nice to add instructions to the documentation, to explain the difference between /dev/sda1 and /dev/sda, where
dd wants the device (/dev/sda) and not the partition (/dev/sda1 or /dev/sda2), to avoid this type of a struggle. On Ubuntu it's
pretty simple to make sure the right device is selected by using the Disks utility, as it shows /dev/XXX for each device, but it's
still not clear even when using this tool what the difference is between a partition and a device, as you can click in the UI on
each partition and see its name, but then /dev/sda is shown in the UI similarly to a partition, adding to the confusion.