SOLVED System does not load FreeNas from USB drive

[Benxas]

Hello all,

Noob to FreeNas and trying to boot up for the first time.

Installed image on 16gb USB drive using win32diskimager for the 8.3.1 image.

Bios is set to boot from USB by default, after posting I get to a boot menu that states:

F1 FreeBSD​

F2 FreeBSD​

F5 Drive 1​

​

F6 PXE​

Boot: F1​

​

It doesn't matter which option I choose, I then get

FreeBSD/x86 boot​

Default: 0:ad(0,a)/boot/loader​

boot:​

I'm not sure what to type at this point to get to the console that's mentioned in all the install guides.

Any help would be greatly appreciated.

 

[dlavigne]

Try wiping the stick first with a tool like Active Kill Disk (http://how-to-erase-hard-drive.com/), then reburning the image with win32diskimager.

 

[Benxas]

I tried wiping the stick last night with active kill disk and then re-writing the image using win32diskimager. Same thing happened. Got to the boot menu described above.

Before I wiped the usb stick, I used windows to delete all the partitions and create a single unallocated space and then used active kill disk. Should I have done something else?

 

[joeschmuck]

Two things you could try:
1) Use a different USB Flash Drive.
2) Grab another copy of the OS and try it. The one you downloaded could be corrupt. And you could just load via the bootable iso and load there in case you have something wrong.

 

[Benxas]

@joeschmuck
I will try a different USB drive tonight as well as downloading and writing a different copy. I have to admit that I didn't check the hash checksum.
On the bootable ISO, I don't have a cd/dvd/bd drive in the system nor do I have a usb one. Are you saying I should copy the ISO to a usb flash drive? If I load the image from a cd drive of some sort (I can probably dig one out of a different system) can I install the O/S to a usb flash drive?
Thanks

 

[Benxas]

I burnt the ISO image to a cd and used a USB DVD drive to try and boot the image. The system recognised the drive and booted as far as

/boot/LOADER Not found
/boot/loader Found

but then the system simply reboots and never gets past this stage.

I will try a different USB stick to boot from and maybe try burning another copy of a newly downloaded iso image file, but I'm running out of things to try and get this booted.

[Update]

So I tried a different USB stick and same problem and I also tried another burnt CD at the lowest speed possible.

But guess what, I popped a freshly downloaded nas4free cd in and it has booted first time no problem. I would rather use FreeNas so any more suggestions?

 

[joeschmuck]

Okay, I have these suggestions for now.

1) To prevent you from spinning your wheels you should run MemTest 86+ on your system for three complete passes. This will take some time and you can download it from the internet. It comes as a bootable iso so you can boot it and run it.
2) Please list your system hardware.
3) If you can run 64 bit (based on your CPU), then you should run the 64 bit version. Please ensure you are running the correct version. I'll know based on your answer to the above question. Also if you have less than 4GB or RAM, you should run the 32 bit version.
4) When you loaded the USB stick from the USB CD drive, did you have any problems loading it?
5) Since it appears you were able to load the FreeNAS image directly to a USB Flash drive earlier, you can do that again if it works for you.

Nas4Free is a good product as well and well supported by it's members. But if you are having problems running FreeNAS, then I would think you would end up having problems with Nas4Free at some point in time.

 

[Benxas]

Thanks for the suggestions, I will try MemTest this evening but I can probably answer some of the other stuff now:

2) HP Microserver N54l (AMD Turion 2.2GHz) , 2GB ECC Ram, 2 x 3TB Toshiba HDD in hardware Raid 1. I know it says not to use hardware raid but I decided against wanting to use ZFS as I had concerns about not being able to increase the storage pool once created if I add more drives and also I wasn't sure if the Zpool would be recoverable if the O/S somehow became corrupted or if I had a serious hardware failure and needed to pull the disks out and extract their contents onto something else. So I decided I'd stick with UFS and a hardware Raid 1 solution. I'm happy to talked out of this though with the right argument.

3) All attempts so far have been with the x64 image and iso, but maybe it's worth trying the x86. Is there much of a performance hit or is it only if you're trying to use 4GB ram and above?

4) I'm not entirely sure what you mean. When I tried to run the system from the bootable cd, it never got to the console stage. I only got as far as it finding the boot loader and then it restarts itself. Therefore I wasn't able to install to the USB flash drive.

On Nas4free, I may have been a bit hasty in saying it booted fine. It did get further in that it booted the CD and got to the nas4free boot menu (not the console menu) but it got stuck shortly after on some sort of scsi cd drive read fail ( i can replicate this error if relevant)

Thanks for all the help.

 

[cyberjock]

I've had very bad luck with FreeBSD and FreeNAS with USB CD-ROM drives. I have always been forced to use internal drives with a SATA cable for 10 minutes just to install the OS.

You should just write the image file using winimager32 as mentioned in the FAQ)(maybe the manual too). It's by far the easiest and has always worked for me.

 

[Benxas]

@cyberjock
I think that may have been the problem when I got so far with the nas4free cd, but I originally started by using win32diskimager and loading the freenas image onto a 16GB usb stick and that's what got me into this pickle. I've tried two different USB sticks and downloaded the image file several times. I will try the x86 version tonight. I even used active kill disk to clear the usb sticks in between attempts. Freenas just won't boot from them for me.

 

[cyberjock]

Doh, you did. Guess I should have read back before posting. You said that yesterday and I forgot.

Frankly, if the x64 version doesn't work, the x86 isn't likely to work any better. If you were planning to use ZFS, you have no choice except to use the x64 version if you want a good performing reliable system.

It sounds like your motherboard may not be compatible with FreeNAS.

 

[Benxas]

Ooh I do hope that isn't the case. There's loads of people who've built NAS's out of these microservers (because they're so damn cheap especially with HP cashback). I'm trying to find an alternative to my current windows home server (which is ageing) and so this is my test-bed with a view to moving it to my main backup resource if testing goes well. As you can see, testing not going so well at the moment.

 

[cyberjock]

I know there's a model of 2 of HP servers that do work with FreeNAS. 99% of issues with booting Freenas are because of user error, hardware incompatibility or not using a good quality USB drive that is at least 4GB.

 

[Benxas]

I may try installing a proper SATA cd drive this evening and booting from that and installing on a USB drive and see if that helps.

Both USb sticks were 16gb, one by Dane-elec and the other integral.

Will try several things this evening and post back on my success.

 

[Benxas]

should have brought the microserver to work and hid it under my desk and tried these things.

 

[cyberjock]

I've never even heard of either of those brands, let alone recommend them as a good brand name. That could be just because you are in a different country though.

 

[Benxas]

You're definitely right about the dane-elec - cheap, but the integral is reasonable stuff. It may be branded differently over in the states.

 

[cyberjock]

I know back in the day many USB sticks were designed in such a way that they weren't bootable at all. Any chance you could try a name brand like Sandisk, Crucial, etc?

 

[Benxas]

I might see if I can borrow a different one from someone else, but both sticks have been successfully used to boot and then install windows operating systems, although admittedly not on this hardware. I may try installing windows just to see if it's a hardware issue.

 

[Benxas]

[Update]
I ran Memtest with 4 passes and no errors were shown.

I have installed a Sata DVD drive into the only non-sas sata port on the MOBO
The FreeNas CD starts to boot correctly (further than ever before) and gets past the error detailed at the start of this post.
It passes the Welcome to FreeNas! screen and I assume chooses the default option:
1. Boot FreeNAS [default]

It does some loading and then seems to get stuck on a scsi CD issue. I've detailed the error below:

(cd0:ata0:0:1:0): READ(10). CDB: 28 0 0 0 e7 0 0 0 1 0
(cd0:ata0:0:1:0): CAM status: SCSI Status Error
(cd0:ata0:0:1:0): SCSI status: Check Condition
(cd0:ata0:0:1:0): SCSI Sense: MEDIUM ERROR asc:11,5 (L-EC uncorrectable error)
(cd0:ata0:0:1:0): cddone: got error 0x5 back

and just keeps looping this message. I'll try a different CD in case it was a burn issue.

Any other suggestions