its a dell inspiron 2005

[Justin Hunt]

It has 6gib of ram and two WD 500gib hard drives. i am able to install everything properly up until the remove installation disk and reboot screen. I reboot without the disk and it freezes halfway through the dell screen that has the f2 and f12 options and becomes completely unresponsive until i remove the thumb drive and reboot. Please help I am getting very confused. Could it be the lack of ram?

 

[dlavigne]

Could it be the lack of ram?

Yup, 8GB is the minimum requirement.

 

[gpsguy]

Laptops are a bad choice for a FreeNAS server. Often the NIC won't be supported and attaching hard disks via USB is an accident waiting to happen.

Check our Resources section for recommended hardware.

 

[danb35]

Google doesn't find any information about an "Inspiron 2005", so it's hard to say. I doubt the problem is the RAM as such--you're less than the minimum, but that wouldn't ordinarily stop the system from booting. I expect the problem lies elsewhere, though as @gpsguy says, a laptop isn't a good choice for a FreeNAS (or any other, really) server. What's the actual model of the laptop, CPU, other hardware, etc.?

 

[Ericloewe]

What happened to the low RAM warning during installation, by the way?

 

[danb35]

It only kicks in at < 4 GB.

 

[styno]

I had to dig but it reminds me of this: https://forums.freenas.org/index.php?threads/freenas-9-3-freezes-dell-pc-in-bios-stage.25761/
Try that gparted procedure, you have nothing to lose at this point. (but when it boots, you really have to decide if you are willing to trust your data on that hardware).

 

[wblock]

What happened to the low RAM warning during installation, by the way?

Should still be there. Last time I looked, it actually checked for somewhat less than 8GB exactly due to the varying amounts of usable RAM in a nominally 8GB system.

 

[Ericloewe]

Should still be there. Last time I looked, it actually checked for somewhat less than 8GB exactly due to the varying amounts of usable RAM in a nominally 8GB system.

Yeah, that part has been discussed for a few years now, but I thought it was set closer to 7GB.

 

[danb35]

I installed 11 (or perhaps 11-U1) the other day in a VM with 4 GB; the warning that popped up said that < 4 GB wasn't recommended.