HP Pavilion P6-2175a Installation Woes

[Bernard Mentink]

Hi All,

I would really like to try FreeNAS and the only machine available is the above.
I burnt the ISO to a CD and installed to a variety of USB pen drives (4G,8G and 32G) bit none of them boot..
(They all installed fine ...)

The 4G just brought up an error about missing boot drive .. the other bigger drives just do nothing and fallback to booting the hard drive OS, even though I select boot from USB drive in the BIOS.

I have tried booting from Legacy as well, still no joy ...

Anyone have any suggestions on this hardware ..

PS: The computer boots other USB OS's like Linux just fine ...

 

[Bernard Mentink]

Hi All,

Very quite on the NAS front .....

An update: As a test I installed to the harddrive I had on the box and tried to boot that .... still did not work, how hard is this?
The bios refuses to boot an install to the harddisk or an install to the usb drive .... just says no boot disk, or faulty disk ..

What do I need to do to get an install to work ...

I have also tried installing from CD or USB drive .....

 

[SweetAndLow]

Does your motherboard support uefi? Try turning that off and see if it helps.

 

[Bernard Mentink]

Hi, thanks for the reply. ..... I thought I was alone on this issue ..

The motherboard supports UEFI, I noticed that the "Storage" option had the choice of UEFI or IDE, I tried IDE, but it still does not boot.

... or do I have to re-do the installation after changing to IDE?

EDIT: Actually I am getting confused ... the storage emulations options were AHCI or IDE, I tried both ..
The drives show up as "Legacy" drives not UEFI

 

[SweetAndLow]

Installation is usually a one time thing. ide and uefi have nothing to do with each other are you sure those are the two options?

 

[Bernard Mentink]

You must have missed my edit above. Regardless, any setting to the bios does not help .... (these OEM bios's are very lean, HP don't want you to mess with anything ... you can't even add a another drive ..)
I think I will give up on this platform, bite the bullet, and by a server motherboard ..

It does concern me though, that I can do any easy Linux install on this machine, but not FreeNAS ..

 

[gpsguy]

For s test, one thing you might try is installing FreeNAS 9.2.1.9 on it.

Yes, it's not the latest version, but if it works, you might get a feel for whether you want to invest in a new machine.


Sent from my iPhone using Tapatalk

 

[Bernard Mentink]

I am confused .... why would this older version help me on this platform?

... and where is the site to download older versions, I cannot see any link from the main download page ..

 

[gpsguy]

I'm suggesting it as a test.

If it works, you can play with that version and get an idea of whether you think FreeNAS is a viable solution for you. If so, use recommended hardware.

Yes, there have been changes between 9.2.1.9 and 9.1.0. New features have been added, but the GUI is largely the same.


FreeNAS 9.3 and later boot from a GPT partition. The device uses ZFS.

Versions 9.2.1.9 and earlier used UFS instead.

You can download current and older versions of the software from here: http://download.freenas.org/

Documentation can be found here: http://doc.freenas.org/

 

[Bernard Mentink]

So if that version works, it might be viable to use on that hardware, as long as that version supports plugins like Plex, as that is a requirement for me, and what I wanted to test ..
Thanks for the help ..

 

[Bernard Mentink]

So that version does partially boot up .... it gets to where it checks the disks.
It gets past da0 the USB boot device, but when it gets to checking da1 the hard drive, it says it is not ready.

I wondered if it powered down by then in some power save mode, so I made sure any power save mode is turned off in the bios ... but no joy ..
Next I will put another harddrive in there to see if that makes a difference ... I suspect not.

Any more suggestions?

 

[depasseg]

Any chance you have a faulty ISO? Did you check the hash?

 

[Bernard Mentink]

The ISO checked fine.
I found the issue was that there is a card-reader on this box, and because it had no media it got stuck ... I put media in it and it did not get stuck.

However, it is trying to mount root from the card-reader, rather than the USB stick I installed to ...

.. fails with /dev/ufs/FreeNASs1a - error 19

Man, this is so hard .... I have installed 3 linux's on this box, but it is taking days to try and get FreeNAS on it .....

EDIT: I removed the cables from the card-reader and now it does not try to read the root file system from there, it now tries to find it from the boot USB stick as it should. However, it doesn't find it, I get an error message about "Primary GPT table corrupt" ...

I am about ready to give up on this ..

 

[Bernard Mentink]

Ha! ..... finally got it to work.
The problem was the USB sticks ..... after trying 6 to install onto, finally got one that I could boot from ...
I am now in the web page .....

Update: I installed plex as per the video and now can watch my movies .... awesome... that part was easy.

Thanks guys for all the help. The only question remains as to why the latest version of FreeNAS would not work.

 

[gpsguy]

I can think of a few things. It could have been the card reader issue, one of the 5 "bad" flash drives, or your hardware isn't compatible with newer versions of FreeNAS.

You might want to buy a new SanDisk or other name brand 8GB+ flash drive and try a newer version. I'd wouldn't use the working one, since we know it's working.

 

[Bernard Mentink]

Thanks. I have a small SSD on order so will try a new version on that.
How will any data I have setup be affected on my data drives, will I have to start again, add plugins etc again?

I am not sure when in the installation process the drives get formatted ..

 

[gpsguy]

You can cancel the setup wizard and restore your "old/current" configuration.

There's an option in the webGUI to save the configuration. You should be saving this file (they are tiny) as you make changes. See the documentation for instructions.

 

[Bernard Mentink]

So these configurations get saved to the data drives then ... ok
Just so I am clear on this, the steps are:

1. Using webGUI save configuration ...
2. Shutdown & remove old working USB stick.
3. Download latest FreeNAS to a usb stick, boot it, and install to my new SSD
4. Boot new SSD but use old/current configuration
5. Everything should be as it was ..... assuming it boots.
6. If it doesn't, I can put the old working USB drive back in, and reboot that ..

Hope I have got all the steps ..

 

[gpsguy]

yes.

In step #4, after it boots and you login to the webgui, it'll prompt you to run the "initial configuaration wizard". exit it, and restore your configuration file.

btw, as i said before, you should backup/save the configuration file, as you make changes to your system. should your boot device fail, you won't have to rebuild the configuration from scratch. you can automate the backup of the file. search for freenas-v1.db on the forum.

 

[Bernard Mentink]

Excellent .. Many Thanks!