SOLVED Install FreeNAS 9.3 in USB drive that wouldn't boot

[lucase]

I just wanted to share this hoping I can save some time to other users:
I had difficulty booting FreeNAS ver. 9.3 from a pen drive after a successful installation.
The problem happened with a Gigabyte GA-EP45-UD3P motherboard (P45 chipset).
The problem was solved making the BIOS to boot from a hard drive (instead as the obvious USB-HDD option), but when selecting the hard drive, select the pen drive that will appear on the list, as if it were any other hard drive. This motherboard booted from the hard drive regardless of what was set in the BIOS, but it followed hard drive boot list.

 

[HoneyBadger]

Hi @lucase,

Having owned one of those motherboards in a circa-2009 gaming PC, I can say that it is not what you want for a FreeNAS server. It only supports old LGA775 chips, and has no ECC support. Getting it to boot from a USB drive correctly should be the least of your concerns.

 

[lucase]

Thank you for your comments. Well I wanted to make a NAS out of old parts. It won't be a "production" one, but a music server (with everything in it backed up). I will see how far I can go with it and learn about FreeNAS while doing it. Worst case it will go back to a Linux desktop.
To get this thing to boot from the usb drive was tough!

 

[HoneyBadger]

Fair enough. Doing this to learn is perfectly fine; I'd advise you to try to acquire the suggested 8GB of RAM though.

My first system was a C2D based Xeon with 8GB and it would merrily saturate GbE in "home use" so performance should be fine.

 

[lucase]

It has 8GB already. Thank you for the advice.

 

[lucase]

One more important thing: On the Gigabyte GA-EP45-UD3P motherboard, the pen drive won't boot as installed. To be able to boot, I went to the disk utility in Debian linux and changed the first partition to EFI system partition and checked the Required/Firmware option. After that the pen drive may be recognized by the motherboard. If you don't do this, the computer won't even start to boot - it will freeze.
How did I find this? Dumb luck.

 

[Randall]

I know this is a post that took place 2 years ago, but I have the same mobo and have FreeNas Corral running on it right now. For me running the FreeNas from a pen drive doesn't work. Boot seems to lockup with a USB drive in place(possibly how the BIOS is configured, or its just flaky). I worked around this by using an OLD 120gb SATA hard drive I had from a laptop. Been thinking of getting a SSD drive of 16 or 32 GB to install and run off of for faster bootup. I'm probably going to be the only one using this system for file storage. The 4Tb drive that I have came from a Seagate Central NAS system that the controller died on. The 500gb and the 80gb and 60 gb drives are in a USB2.0 drive enclosure as they are all EIDE Drives. So far I've had little problem connecting to the system and it works great.

The Following is a copy from the System Overview

Build
FreeNAS-Corral-10.0.4
Uptime
1 days 22 hours 8 minutes 10 seconds
System Time
April 29, 2017 08:08:51 PM
Platform

Intel(R) Core(TM)2 Duo CPU E8400 @ 3.00GHz
2 Cores @ 3GHz
CPU VM Support
None
Memory
7.96GB

HDD


111.79GB x 1

3.64TB x 1

74.54GB x 1

465.76GB x 1

55.9GB x 1

 

[Ericloewe]

have FreeNas Corral running on it right now

Your first step is to get rid of that,
https://forums.freenas.org/index.php?threads/important-announcement-regarding-freenas-corral.53502/

 

[Randall]

Your first step is to get rid of that,
https://forums.freenas.org/index.php?threads/important-announcement-regarding-freenas-corral.53502/

Thanks for the link. Moving over to 9.10.2.-U2.

 

[Cap Anson]

One more important thing: On the Gigabyte GA-EP45-UD3P motherboard, the pen drive won't boot as installed. To be able to boot, I went to the disk utility in Debian linux and changed the first partition to EFI system partition and checked the Required/Firmware option. After that the pen drive may be recognized by the motherboard. If you don't do this, the computer won't even start to boot - it will freeze.
How did I find this? Dumb luck.

I know this is 2 year old post, but I'm a NOOB just starting to play with FreeNAS. Have this same motherboard and finally was able to boot using a USB drive with Fat32 partition, but as if I install the FreeNAS bootable USB drive (have tried with 2 different drives from different mfg) in any port, the system will completely hang if its before the boot process hands off to the OS. Have tried a bunch of the other solutions (PLOB, remove all other USB devices, etc). I think this is the only option I haven't tried and reluctant to do so without some more explicit instructions on how to do this. I have bootable disks for Debian Live and GPARTed that MIGHT be able to handle this. But if anyone has some more explicit examples, I've love to try. Otherwise I'm going to return to using a small form SATA drive as boot drive as I continue to play and learn. Objective is to use this to house my PLEX media and also handle some onsite backups from the other PCs around the house.