SOLVED New FreeNAS Installation will not load from USB drive

[Benjamin Krajmalnik]

I recently downloaded FreeNAS 9.2.1.7 in order to evaluate it. It is running on a SuperMicro chassis with 12 drive bays. Motherboard is a SuperMicro PDSMU (8GB RAM Max, fully populated). Controller uses a LSI 1078 chipset. On the initial install I attempted to load to a USB stick (Sandisk Ultra 16GB). The system would not boot. In order to evaluate and run some performance tests on the hardware, I loaded it to one of the HD drives - system worked perfectly. Was able to run all of my test cases. I purchased a new Sandisk Cruzer Fit 16GB USB stick (due to its low profile, since I was afraid of he USB stick getting knocked off). Installed the image from the ISO installer. THe system begins to boot, boot loader works, system loads - I see the hardware probing from the kernel without issue. When it tries to mount from ufs:/dev/ufs/FreeNas1a it is not finding it and dumping me to /bin/sh, and after a while the system appears to be restarting in an attempt to boot. As previously mentioned, booting from a drive from the main controller works fine. As an option I could install a small SSD on the motherboard controller and boot from it in order to retain the full capacity of the chassis, but I wanted to use that as a L2ARC (due to the small amount of RAM). Any suggestions are deeply appreciated.

 

[dlavigne]

What command and utility did you use to write the image to the USB drive?

 

[Benjamin Krajmalnik]

I launched FreeNAS from the x64 ISO Image, selected the install option and selected the USB stick from the available targets.

 

[Benjamin Krajmalnik]

Further information. I just performed an install to one of the HDD's. I just noticed that when creating the image to the USB stick, it did not return to the message stating that the installation was successful. I also noticed that it took a long time to write the last bit of data to the HD (it was at 99.8% for close to a minute whereas the status line indicated it would be about 1 second). Apparently, the writing of the image to the USB stick is ending prematurely, which would explain the missing files. I will try creating the USB stick image on a different machine later on to see if it is related to that specific server.

Also, one item that I noted is that smartctl does not see the hard drives when I scan for them. The controller is a LSI 1078. In order to be able to monitor it, I would need to load mfip.so, but I do not see it in the distribution. Is there a way for me to add it to the image, and a way to modify the /boot/loader.conf so it will load it?

 

[dlavigne]

Also, one item that I noted is that smartctl does not see the hard drives when I scan for them. The controller is a LSI 1078. In order to be able to monitor it, I would need to load mfip.so, but I do not see it in the distribution. Is there a way for me to add it to the image, and a way to modify the /boot/loader.conf so it will load it?

That uses mfi(4). If it is not loading automatically, create a Tunable named mfi_load with a value of YES.

 

[Benjamin Krajmalnik]

Update: I was able to successfully create the USB stick image on an other machine and it is booting.
I tried to add the tunable from the GUI, but it is not saving it. I went to the console of the server to see if there were any errors and there were notices about issues with ti being unable to open /var/db when trying to stored the rrd data for reports (however, I do see report grapgs are being updated properly).
I then came back to the GUI, tired to open a shell, and it was stuck on "Loading". Tired going to the configuration to change the time zone - did not allow me to. This was working fine when booting to the hard drive.
Thank you very much for your help, dlavigne - it is most appreciated.

 

[Benjamin Krajmalnik]

OK. I cleared the cache on the browser and not it appears to be working ok.
I wonder if it just had to do with a session on the web browser.