mounting from zfs:freenas-boot/ROOT/default fails with error 5

[dhenzler]

I get the error "mounting from zfs:freenas-boot/ROOT/default fails with error 5"
I had my Xyratex HS-1235t up and running with four 4TB drives. Was running smoothly while I did some basic configuration. Then when I started uploading files to the pool, one of the drives failed. Not having read the manual, I simply removed the drive with it's hot swap caddy. Rebuilt the pool adding another drive and started uploading again. A second drive failed... I was concerned that I had some real system problems. I replaced it with yet another drive, and shortly afterwards it too failed. Total of 3 bad drives. But turned out the drives that failed were from a batch purchased from the same provider.

I rebuilt the pool once more with only two drives in simple Raid. And continued to run... successfully uploading over 500GB to the NAS. I knew I was likely to have difficulty with this situation, but didn't realize how much. I had da1 & da2 in the system, and da0 and da4 had been removed and packed for return. I knew there might be trouble after reading about removing drives from a pool... but! too late.

This morning I decided to attack the problem and have yet to be successful in restarting FreeNAS. I built a new USB stick, and pulled the drives out to see if it would start with NO drives present... no luck.

Alternate boot attempts produce "Solaris: NOTICE: Cannot find the pool label for "freenas-boot"

Is there a way around this...

My system is an IBM HS-1235T Server Xeon E5645 2.40GHz & 24GB RAM with an LSI 9201-8i controller

Somebody has to know what to do...

 

[dlavigne]

Definitely sounds like the boot device died. Were you able to successfully reinstall to a new boot device?

 

[dhenzler]

Turns out the S L O W N E S S is caused by USB setting in BIOS. USB3 should be off. But to answer the initial question... waiting for the slow working USB stick to respond... finally the middleware kicked in and the system started ok. I found the article about USB3 after hours of research.

Now I have the problem that I disabled my USB to the point where my keyboard doesn't work. So today will disconnect the CMOS battery and try to see if that resets the BIOS. Not having any other keyboard or mouse port is not good. HP Proliant DL380's are superior to this Xyratex HS-1235t in that respect. But for $100 this will eventually work out to be a great storage box.

"M A R C H 3 , 2 0 1 9 BY DA N I E L M E T T L E R
FreeNAS 11.2/FreeBSD BTX boot loader 1.0: Very slow booting if “Legacy USB 3.0 Support” is enabled
Starting with version 11.2-RELEASE-U1, FreeNAS uses the FreeBSD BTX 1.0 boot loader instead of Grub (reason: The FreeBSD boot loader fnally started supporting ZFS – years after Grub supported it, BTW).

Unlike Grub, the FreeBSD boot loader seems to have rather “suboptimal” support
for storage devices (like USB sticks, USB drives) that are accessed using the
legacy USB 3.0 mode at boot time. So, when I upgraded FreeNAS from 11.1-U7 to
11.2-RELEASE-U2 on my home-built ASRock FreeNAS E3C226D2I NAS
appliance, booting FreeNAS from an internal 16 GB USB 3 stick took all of a
sudden almost 30 minutes(!) instead of the usual 1-2 minutes.
As I found out by “trial & error” (or educated guessing, as some would say), the
only reason for this huge slowdown was that “Legacy USB 3.0 Support” was
enabled in the AMI BIOS (the effect is reproducible). So, just disable “Legacy USB
3.0 Support”[1] in the BIOS and FreeNAS >= 11.2 will boot quickly again.

[1] Note:
There’s no need to disable “Legacy USB Support”, so you’ll still be able to
138.201.46.43 use your USB 2 keyboard or mouse at boot time."

There is very little information available on the Xyratex HS-1235t and the mounting makes it expensive to use. Likely wouldn't buy another one unless it was dirt cheap.... which this one was.