HP DL380 G7 wont boot from SD Card

[Sivivatu]

I'm setting up my first home server and purchased an ex-enterprise HP DL380 G7 for the job. I have run the installer for FreeNAS successfully targeting the SD drive for the job. However, when I try to reboot and start FreeNAS the SD boot is not recognised and I don't find any boot files.

Is there something I need to do to allow booting from an SD Drive?

 

[Elliot Dierksen]

Do you have an external USB drive installed? There is a BIOS option buried somewhere that lets you give preference to ether the internal or external device. I have a DL360 G7 that boos from SD. Here is what that looks like from iLo.

 

[Sivivatu]

I'm not sure how to access the iLo interface, (plugged in my network to the iLo port but doesn't appear in Advanced IP Scanner). The bootloop errors I get are shown in images below. (not sure if this will help I'm very new to Sys Admin and that's part of the reason for this system).

 

[Elliot Dierksen]

Here are what my boot options look like from the BIOS.

Then under System Options -> USB Options -> Removable Flash Media Boot Sequence, there is this menu.

My gut is that there is something wrong with the format of your drive key/SD card. How did you create it? What install media were you using?

 

[Sivivatu]

So I created the install media (current download option from the FreeNAS download page) from windows with Rufus installing to a USB key. The SD card was brand new but I didn't do anything before putting into the internal SD slot

Boot order:

USB option

 

[Elliot Dierksen]

I don't use Rufus, but I have seen some things that indicate that the options used when creating the install media matter. You can probably find that by searching for other threads about Rufus and install media. My other comment would be that I would suggest that you have the external drive keys preferred first. My reason for that is in case you need to repair something. Normally an external key would not be there, so it would boot from the internal SD card. It is harder to interrupt the boot process and get it to boot from something else if you are trying to do repair or upgrade. You may have security concerns that override that, but that is why I always make the external keys the first choice.

 

[Sivivatu]

So I have been continuing to try and work this out but am not getting any further at all. I thought the issue might be trying to boot from an sd card so I purchased an 8gb Kingston USB, ran the installer targeting the USB (removed the old sd drive), had a "successful" install but on trying to reboot no boot devices can be found.
I ran gpart show on the target device which returned the install partition (gpt) with a freebsd boot and a zfs sub-partition

Code:

gpart show da2
40         15138736    da2    GPT    (7.2G)
40        1024        1    freebsd-boot (512K)
1064    15137712    2    freebsd-zfs (7.2G)

I also ran a checksum on the install media and that returned as correct
also if i try to reinstall over top of the media it errors with

Code:

dd: /dev/da2: Operation not permitted
The Freenas installation on da2 has failed

Not sure what is happening and what is going wrong

 

[Sivivatu]

So I have managed to solve this issue and get FreeNAS installed by using the old UI version (FreeNAS 11.1-U6.3) rather than the new UI version (FreeNAS 11.2-RELEASE-U1). I don't know why it wouldn't boot at all but hopefully, that will be fixed in a future update.