First, a quick summary of my situation so you guys get a general idea of where my problem lies. Then I go into more details so that those of you who think you might be able to help have as much information as possible.
SUMMARY
So I think I’ve successfully installed FreeNAS onto two SSDs in my “new” Dell R510, but I’m having trouble booting. It’s set to boot into BIOS, and when I get into boot manager, the those SSDs are nowhere to be found. In fact, neither are any of my other 12 HDDs.
The problem might stem from the RAID controller card. I got the Dell PERC H200 because it was cheap and apparently people here have gotten it to work reliably. After some trials and tribulations, I think I successfully flashed it to LSI 9211-8i IT Mode by following this helpful guide (plus about a million blog and forum posts).
My evidence that the firmware flashing worked is that when I load the FreeNAS installer, it lists all my disks. So I select the two SSDs, intall FreeNAS, reboot, and… uh... now I can’t find those disks anywhere in the BIOS. It's as if they don't exist. Help?
SETUP
CROSSFLASHING
I’ll go into all the details here in case it’s helps you help me. You can probably skip over most of this though.
Step one is to create a USB drive that is bootable into FreeDOS and also has all these files in the root folder.
This took a while. First of all, I don’t have any PCs lying around the house, only Macs. Apparently this is not a thing that people with Macs have to do, because, as far as I can tell, you cannot make a bootable drive with a volume any bigger than the absolute minimum necessary for a disk image. Let me explain
If you do this in Terminal using the dd command, the boot disk volume that’s created is exactly as big as the disk image. Which, I imagine, is find in most circumstances for most people. But if you need to put a bunch of files in the root folder, you’re outta luck. And no, you can’t expand the volume in Terminal or Disk Utility—I tried.
Everyone says use Rufus. There is no Rufus for Mac. There’s Etcher, but that has the same limitation as dd. Same goes for Disk Utility.
Somehow a friend of mine, whom I dragged to my house and forced to help me, got it to work by just copying the FreeDOS img and the folder onto the USB drive and then booting the server via UEFI.
By some miracle, we got the shell up, so then we differed to the guide: find the right drive, run listall, write down the SAS Address, and run sas2flash.efi -o -f -GBPSAS.FW.
But then I got stuck. It said “Failed Reconnecting the EFI Driver. (EFI Error: Not Found)”, so then I panicked and called a different friend, who found this helpful blog post. He said reboot, so I rebooted. And the thing was bricked. I was in the exact same boat as this guy. Nothing was working; all the sas2flash.efi commands gave me the same error as before I rebooted.
From what I gathered, the best route was probably to try to get into FreeDOS via BIOS rather than UEFI so that I could run all those megarec.exe commands.
So I went back to the first friend and begged him to go find his old PC so we could download Rufus and make a bootable disk the right way this time. He abided, downloaded stuff, ran stuff, and boom, we’ve got a bootable USB drive! And it worked! I went back to the original guide and flashed the thing. We did it! Woo hoo!
INSTALLING FREENAS
I picked the Fresh Install option, and waddaya know, all 14 drives showed up. I selected the two SSDs by hitting spacebar on both of them (that’s how you make a mirrored boot drive, right?), chose to boot via BIOS and then proceeded with the install. It said the installation was successful. So I shut down, removed the FreeNAS installer boot drive, turned it back on, and went into the BIOS boot manager, expecting my lovely new FreeNAS disks to show up.
Nuthin’. “No boot options.” Huh. So I go into system setup, boot sequence, etc., nothing. I hit every freaking button on the keyboard to try to add a drive to the boot sequence, nothing.
Maybe it doesn’t like boot into BIOS? So I plug the FreeNAS installer drive back in and start over, except this time I select UEFI. Fresh install, format drives, etc. Reboot into UEFI, nothing, UEFI boot manager, add drives, nothing. Absolutely nothing.
CROSSFLASHING, PART II
(You can skip this section, too, probably.)
At this point, I decided I'd post here. I started writing all this, but before I hit post, I decided I should dig around on the forums in case I missed something. Then I found this lovely guide. Though the instructions were essentially the same, I thought I’d give it a shot before posting. Besides, I already knew what I was doing; it should go smoothly, right?
Nope. This turned out to be just as difficult as the first go-around. First, the boot FreeDOS boot drive wouldn’t work with the files provided in the guide. I kept getting CONFIG.SYS errors, plus an error that said something like “Incorrect version of MS-DOS.” Any commands I tried just got spat back in my face.
I would wager a guess that the cause was something to do with the keyboard something something in the CONFIG.SYS file, or maybe the COMMAND.COM file. I don’t know. All I know is that that folder render the FreeDOS that Rufus puts on a USB drive totally unusable. at least in my system. After much fiddling, reading, trialing, and erroring, the only way I could get this to work was to redo Rufus, copy the files from the first guide, and then copy over the select few files that looked different and important from the second guide.
I booted into BIOS and then found MS-DOS sitting there, ready to go.
Also, something not particularly worth noting but I'm going to note it anyway because it's interesting: it turns out that the only difference in the procedure when I followed the first guide vs. the second one was that the second put the card in P7 firmware first before moving onto P20, whereas the first skipped straight to P20. It doesn't seem to have made much of a difference.
INSTALL FREENAS, PART 11 (get it?)
Then FreeNAS 11 was released(!), which, along with having completed my crossflashing redo just minutes earlier, gave me some hope. (Note to self: I really gotta stop with this whole “hope” thing.) So I Etchered the new ISO to a different USB, turned the ignition, and waited for something to go wrong.
It didn’t take long—in fact, before I'd even gotten to the FreeNAS Installer Console Setup home page thing, I saw error messages fly by. They went too quickly to write down what they were, but I suppose I could record a video or something if you're curious.
We made it to the that familiar screen where I could choose Install/Upgrade, so that’s what I did. And there were all my drives. Excellent! I feel like I've seen this movie before, but whatever.
Spacebar on the two SSDs, enter—WHOA! Everything went nuts. Lots of “Retrying Command” stuff. I thought it was going to be stuck there, but somehow it persevered and the “WARNING: THIS WILL ERASE YOUR ENTIRE SOUL” message popped up. I proceeded, picked a password, chose BIOS, and let it run.
It hung on “Retrying Command” again, and I thought it had a chance of working things out on its own again. So I went and made breakfast. When I came back, it was in a loop of retrying command and something about an SCSI Status Error. So then I took a shower, and when I cam back, it said installation had failed. But then it decided to try again all on its own, so now it’s been retrying some sad command for the past two hours. Somehow I doubt this will work.
POSSIBLE SOLUTIONS/EXPLANATIONS I’VE READ OR THOUGHT OF
OTHER (PERHAPS) NOTEWORTHY DETAILS
CLOSING REMARKS
If you need any more details (as you can probably tell, I don't mind writing waaaaay too many words), photos of my screen at various points, any other information, just let me know and I'll get that for you ASAP. If this is in the wrong section of the forum, I’ll happily move it. I greatly appreciate any help you can provide, in addition to the help you’ve already provided courtesy of dozens of old threads I’ve read through, which were what allowed me to get this far in the first place. Thanks so much!
SUMMARY
So I think I’ve successfully installed FreeNAS onto two SSDs in my “new” Dell R510, but I’m having trouble booting. It’s set to boot into BIOS, and when I get into boot manager, the those SSDs are nowhere to be found. In fact, neither are any of my other 12 HDDs.
The problem might stem from the RAID controller card. I got the Dell PERC H200 because it was cheap and apparently people here have gotten it to work reliably. After some trials and tribulations, I think I successfully flashed it to LSI 9211-8i IT Mode by following this helpful guide (plus about a million blog and forum posts).
My evidence that the firmware flashing worked is that when I load the FreeNAS installer, it lists all my disks. So I select the two SSDs, intall FreeNAS, reboot, and… uh... now I can’t find those disks anywhere in the BIOS. It's as if they don't exist. Help?
SETUP
- Dell PowerEdge R510 II
- Dell PERC H200
- 12x HGST Deskstar 4 TB 7200 RPM NAS 3.5" HDD in the main HDD bays
- 2x Intel 520 120 GB SSD in the Internal Hard Drive caddy thing
- Intel Xeon L5640 6-Core 2.26 GHz
- 4x Samsung 16 GB 1333 MHz DDR3 EEC RAM
CROSSFLASHING
I’ll go into all the details here in case it’s helps you help me. You can probably skip over most of this though.
Step one is to create a USB drive that is bootable into FreeDOS and also has all these files in the root folder.
This took a while. First of all, I don’t have any PCs lying around the house, only Macs. Apparently this is not a thing that people with Macs have to do, because, as far as I can tell, you cannot make a bootable drive with a volume any bigger than the absolute minimum necessary for a disk image. Let me explain
If you do this in Terminal using the dd command, the boot disk volume that’s created is exactly as big as the disk image. Which, I imagine, is find in most circumstances for most people. But if you need to put a bunch of files in the root folder, you’re outta luck. And no, you can’t expand the volume in Terminal or Disk Utility—I tried.
Everyone says use Rufus. There is no Rufus for Mac. There’s Etcher, but that has the same limitation as dd. Same goes for Disk Utility.
Somehow a friend of mine, whom I dragged to my house and forced to help me, got it to work by just copying the FreeDOS img and the folder onto the USB drive and then booting the server via UEFI.
By some miracle, we got the shell up, so then we differed to the guide: find the right drive, run listall, write down the SAS Address, and run sas2flash.efi -o -f -GBPSAS.FW.
But then I got stuck. It said “Failed Reconnecting the EFI Driver. (EFI Error: Not Found)”, so then I panicked and called a different friend, who found this helpful blog post. He said reboot, so I rebooted. And the thing was bricked. I was in the exact same boat as this guy. Nothing was working; all the sas2flash.efi commands gave me the same error as before I rebooted.
From what I gathered, the best route was probably to try to get into FreeDOS via BIOS rather than UEFI so that I could run all those megarec.exe commands.
So I went back to the first friend and begged him to go find his old PC so we could download Rufus and make a bootable disk the right way this time. He abided, downloaded stuff, ran stuff, and boom, we’ve got a bootable USB drive! And it worked! I went back to the original guide and flashed the thing. We did it! Woo hoo!
INSTALLING FREENAS
I picked the Fresh Install option, and waddaya know, all 14 drives showed up. I selected the two SSDs by hitting spacebar on both of them (that’s how you make a mirrored boot drive, right?), chose to boot via BIOS and then proceeded with the install. It said the installation was successful. So I shut down, removed the FreeNAS installer boot drive, turned it back on, and went into the BIOS boot manager, expecting my lovely new FreeNAS disks to show up.
Nuthin’. “No boot options.” Huh. So I go into system setup, boot sequence, etc., nothing. I hit every freaking button on the keyboard to try to add a drive to the boot sequence, nothing.
Maybe it doesn’t like boot into BIOS? So I plug the FreeNAS installer drive back in and start over, except this time I select UEFI. Fresh install, format drives, etc. Reboot into UEFI, nothing, UEFI boot manager, add drives, nothing. Absolutely nothing.
CROSSFLASHING, PART II
(You can skip this section, too, probably.)
At this point, I decided I'd post here. I started writing all this, but before I hit post, I decided I should dig around on the forums in case I missed something. Then I found this lovely guide. Though the instructions were essentially the same, I thought I’d give it a shot before posting. Besides, I already knew what I was doing; it should go smoothly, right?
Nope. This turned out to be just as difficult as the first go-around. First, the boot FreeDOS boot drive wouldn’t work with the files provided in the guide. I kept getting CONFIG.SYS errors, plus an error that said something like “Incorrect version of MS-DOS.” Any commands I tried just got spat back in my face.
I would wager a guess that the cause was something to do with the keyboard something something in the CONFIG.SYS file, or maybe the COMMAND.COM file. I don’t know. All I know is that that folder render the FreeDOS that Rufus puts on a USB drive totally unusable. at least in my system. After much fiddling, reading, trialing, and erroring, the only way I could get this to work was to redo Rufus, copy the files from the first guide, and then copy over the select few files that looked different and important from the second guide.
I booted into BIOS and then found MS-DOS sitting there, ready to go.
- Megarec.exe -writesbr worked nicely; so did -cleanflash.
- Reboot.
- Sas2flsh.exe -c 0 -o -f 6GBPSAS.FW from the old guide worked.
- Reboot.
- Sas2flsh.exe -c 0 -o -f 2118p7.bin worked.
- Reboot
- Sas2flsh.exe -c 0 -o -f LSI-P20-2118.bin from the new guide didn’t work, but 2118it.bin did, and, according to sas2flsh.exe -c 0 -list, successfully put it in P20.
- Reboot.
- Sas2flsh.exe -c 0 -o -sasadd [original SAS Address] worked.
Also, something not particularly worth noting but I'm going to note it anyway because it's interesting: it turns out that the only difference in the procedure when I followed the first guide vs. the second one was that the second put the card in P7 firmware first before moving onto P20, whereas the first skipped straight to P20. It doesn't seem to have made much of a difference.
INSTALL FREENAS, PART 11 (get it?)
Then FreeNAS 11 was released(!), which, along with having completed my crossflashing redo just minutes earlier, gave me some hope. (Note to self: I really gotta stop with this whole “hope” thing.) So I Etchered the new ISO to a different USB, turned the ignition, and waited for something to go wrong.
It didn’t take long—in fact, before I'd even gotten to the FreeNAS Installer Console Setup home page thing, I saw error messages fly by. They went too quickly to write down what they were, but I suppose I could record a video or something if you're curious.
We made it to the that familiar screen where I could choose Install/Upgrade, so that’s what I did. And there were all my drives. Excellent! I feel like I've seen this movie before, but whatever.
Spacebar on the two SSDs, enter—WHOA! Everything went nuts. Lots of “Retrying Command” stuff. I thought it was going to be stuck there, but somehow it persevered and the “WARNING: THIS WILL ERASE YOUR ENTIRE SOUL” message popped up. I proceeded, picked a password, chose BIOS, and let it run.
It hung on “Retrying Command” again, and I thought it had a chance of working things out on its own again. So I went and made breakfast. When I came back, it was in a loop of retrying command and something about an SCSI Status Error. So then I took a shower, and when I cam back, it said installation had failed. But then it decided to try again all on its own, so now it’s been retrying some sad command for the past two hours. Somehow I doubt this will work.
POSSIBLE SOLUTIONS/EXPLANATIONS I’VE READ OR THOUGHT OF
- These SSDs aren’t working. I tried installing to other HDDs, both with and without mirroring them, and nothing else worked.
- The Firmware and the FreeBSD driver don't match. I just read about this like 10 minutes ago on here and here. So I ran mesg | grep “mps0: Firmware” and found that—low and behold—they don't match. My controller is at P20 and FreeBSD wants... P21? Huh? If you thought P20 was the latest, well, so did I. And we were right, it turns out. And this is not an issue.
- Move the card out of the Integrated Storage Controller Card slot and into one of the PCIe slots. I tried that but then noticed the two included SAS cables don’t reach all the way to the back where the PCIe slots are. I’ve got two new cables coming in the mail—I’ll give this a shot when those arrive.
- The SAS cables that came with the R510 are bad. Again, we’ll try the new ones when they get here, which should be tomorrow (Friday).
- The H200 is totally hopeless and I should have just spent an extra like $15 to get the LSI 9211-8i in the first place. Well, on Monday I caved and bought one, so now instead of spending an extra $15, I spent an extra $50 to buy a RAID card that’ll end up just sitting around. Lesson learned.
OTHER (PERHAPS) NOTEWORTHY DETAILS
- Before I even began the corssflashing process in the first place, the first thing I did when I put my new machine together was install FreeNAS. Because, like, why not? Just like in the two “Installing FreeNAS” sections above, all my disks showed up like they’re supposed to. But just like in the above sections, after installation, they never showed up in my boot options.
- I now have access to a PC. It doesn’t have any HDDs anything, but if I need to play with a motherboard other than the one on the R510, I can do that.
- I am pretty far out of my league in setting this up. I might come across as reasonably knowledgeable from this post, but believe you me, I have no idea what I’m doing. I have friends who are smarter than be but EVEN THEY are stumped. Either that, or they’re sick of my pestering them.
- The impetus for this endeavor is that I do a lot of video editing—some of which is collaborative—and a lot of traveling. Those two things don’t mix. I don’t really like dragging external drives with me wherever I go, I don’t like my stuff not being backed up all the time, and I don’t like having to drive across town or fly across the country to collaborate with someone. I decided to build a server that would serve (get it?) as a video hub: all my video files would live there, nicely organized, along with all the Final Cut Pro X library files. If I’m at home, I access it over LAN (via NFS? I like what these people did). If my coworkers are in town, they come to the house and also access it over LAN. If I need to work remotely or share files to a coworker, I can do that (Also via NFS? I don’t really know how all this works—please refer to Noteworthy Detail 3.)
- Yes, I know, I probably should have just gotten a Synology or a QNAP or something, but here we are nonetheless.
CLOSING REMARKS
If you need any more details (as you can probably tell, I don't mind writing waaaaay too many words), photos of my screen at various points, any other information, just let me know and I'll get that for you ASAP. If this is in the wrong section of the forum, I’ll happily move it. I greatly appreciate any help you can provide, in addition to the help you’ve already provided courtesy of dozens of old threads I’ve read through, which were what allowed me to get this far in the first place. Thanks so much!