PC locking up at console setup screen

[road hazard]

I'd like to try out FreeNAS but when my PC is booting FreeNAS from the USB drive, it gets all the way to the 'console setup' screen where I have 4 options but my PC freezes. The only thing that works is touching my power button. This initiates a shutdown but I can't get it installed. I tried USB 3.0 ports, USB 2.0 ports, front ports/back ports, different thumb drives and nothing.

My board is an Asrock Z77 Extreme 4.

Any ideas as to what I should try?

 

[Robert Trevellyan]

Any ideas as to what I should try?

This may seem rude ... try hardware that's better suited to FreeNAS, or play with FreeNAS in a VM to see if you like it. That mobo appears to check all the 'not suitable for FreeNAS' boxes.

 

[road hazard]

This may seem rude ... try hardware that's better suited to FreeNAS, or play with FreeNAS in a VM to see if you like it. That mobo appears to check all the 'not suitable for FreeNAS' boxes.

I fired it up in a VM environment and it half worked. I had 6 hard drives inside the VM and I wanted to practice playing around with RAIDZ2 but it only saw 1/2 the capacity of the drives. So I'm back to wanting to test it on physical hardware. I checked the requirements document and while it appears to be on the dated side, I don't think my hardware is any less suited for FreeNAS than generic NAS boxes or the other myriad of bare bone systems I've see it run on. FreeBSD works fine on my PC.

No biggie either way. I don't think my system is frozen frozen since I can still shut it down by tapping the power button. Maybe it's something stupid like it locks out my keyboard. I'm going to see if I have an old PS/2 keyboard and try with that hooked up. If no luck with that, guess I'll just give up on FreeNAS.

UPDATE: I guess my USB keyboard is too new for FreeNAS. I knocked the cobwebs off an old PS/2 keyboard and hooked it up and was able to get pass the main installer screen.

 

[SweetAndLow]

Your hardware isn't really suitable for freenas but have fun. How big of virtual disks did you use with the vm testing? I bet you use 4GB disks. The reason you only saw half your expected size is because freenas uses 2GB per disk for swap. Make sure you are always using 8GB of memory or more if you can.

 

[road hazard]

Your hardware isn't really suitable for freenas but have fun. How big of virtual disks did you use with the vm testing? I bet you use 4GB disks. The reason you only saw half your expected size is because freenas uses 2GB per disk for swap. Make sure you are always using 8GB of memory or more if you can.

I don't recall the size of the virtual disks. I know it was several gigs. My PC has 32 gigs of RAM.

Can you tell me where exactly my PC is failing in the "not suitable for FreeNAS" department? Is it the lack of ECC memory? If so, I'm absolutely not worried about that. I understand the risk of bit flipping but this is something I'm not going to lose sleep over. So other than that, why isn't my PC suitable for FreeNAS?

 

[wblock]

Is your keyboard a "gaming" keyboard, maybe with backlight? I recently updated the usb_quirk(4) man page in FreeBSD with an example for a quirk that fixes some of those:
https://www.freebsd.org/cgi/man.cgi...=FreeBSD+11.0-stable&arch=default&format=html

 

[Robert Trevellyan]

Is it the lack of ECC memory?

This is #1. The fancy sound hardware is #2, but you can probably disable that in the BIOS. The fact that you had trouble booting with a USB keyboard attached is #3. The long list of special features is #4.

I'm not trying to spoil your fun if all you want to do is test-drive FreeNAS, but if you decide to use FreeNAS for anything you care about, start by taking a look at the hardware recommendations in these forums.

 

[wblock]

Can you tell me where exactly my PC is failing in the "not suitable for FreeNAS" department?

I would say "not ideal". As you said, it doesn't have ECC. But you are not using it in a datacenter application, and understand the implications. That second part is important, because not everyone understands.

 

[road hazard]

Is your keyboard a "gaming" keyboard, maybe with backlight? I recently updated the usb_quirk(4) man page in FreeBSD with an example for a quirk that fixes some of those:
https://www.freebsd.org/cgi/man.cgi...=FreeBSD+11.0-stable&arch=default&format=html

Ha, funny you would mention that..... it is indeed a back lit, gaming keyboard (Logitech G510 maybe?). I guess we can toss that in the "not suitable for FreeNAS pile" :) I'm a total n00b with all this so I'm guessing on the console setup screen (at work right now) there was an option to feed that "usb_quirk_load="YES"" command to the kernel before it loads? (Main screen)

 

[road hazard]

I would say "not ideal". As you said, it doesn't have ECC. But you are not using it in a datacenter application, and understand the implications. That second part is important, because not everyone understands.

My intended use is just as a Plex server. I'm fully aware that not using ECC memory with ZFS isn't ideal and some would say, 'Down right dumb" but I'm just serving up ripped movies and TV shows captured from a Tablo/OTA setup. So, if everything goes up in a big ball of flames, no big deal.