Trouble installing FreeNAS 8.3.

[praecorloth]

Hey guys,

I am running in to problem after problem just trying to install FreeNAS 8.3. This is not normal for me. I'm used to stuff in the *nix world just installing and going with whatever hardware I present it with. First, the hardware.

Athlon 64 x2 later generation
4GB DDR2
Asus M3N78-EM motherboard
No drives yet. Just a USB CD drive (although I have also tried an internal SATA drive), and a CF/IDE adapter with a 2GB CF card on it. Also tried a 500GB SATA drive just to rule it out.

The first issue I ran in to was the system would hang after detecting my external CD/DVD drive. After a minute it would give the error,

run_interrupt_driven_hooks: still waiting after 60 seconds for xpt_config

A little Googling brought me to the answer that Firewire was the culprit. Disabling that in the BIOS fixed me nicely. I didn't get very far beyond that point, however. Upon booting with Firewire disabled, it detected my external CD/DVD drive, then gave me more information about it, noting that it was going to be called cd0, and that's it. The last messages are,

cd0 at umass-sim0 bus 0 scbus8 target 0 lun 0
cd0: <ASUS SDR-08B1-U 1.00> Removable CD-ROM SCSI-0 device
cd0: 40.000MB/s transfers
cd0: cd present [57040 x2048 byte records]

And nothing after that. Trying with my internal SATA DVD drive I get,

cd0 at ahcich0 bus 0 scbus2 target 0 lun 0
cd0: <TSSTcorp CD/DVDW SH-S183L SB00> Removable CD-ROM SCSI-0 device
cd0: 150.000MB/s transfer (SATA 1.x, UDMA2, ATAPI 12bytes, PIO 8192bytes)
cd0: cd present [57040 x 2048 byte records]
ada0: 16.700MB/s transfers (WDMA2, PIO 512bytes)
ada0: 1935MB (3964464 512 byte sectors: 16H 63S/T 3933C)
SMP: AP CPU #1 Launched!

And nothing after that. I'm guessing since I have a dual core CPU and it seems to have trouble bringing up the second CPU, there's a problem with it? I'd find it odd, but not out of the question. This motherboard and processor have been used as a primary desktop machine for the wife for the last 3, 4 years or so. It had the fairly rare sudden reboot, but I always attributed those to being a result of her Google searches for "Watch Dr Who Online Free." :) Anyways, unfortunately I can't disable cores in this motherboard, at least not at this version of the BIOS. It is woefully out of date, but I can't update it to save my life.

Any other tips and tricks anyone can think of?

 

[cyberjock]

When you say you can't update it to save your life what do you mean? You tried to update but it failed or you couldn't find an update?

If you tried to update it and it failed that could be a sign of some hardware problem with your motherboard.

 

[Ravefiend]

Still I would suggest to look into the BIOS for this. Try updating it to the latest one available and if you already got that, maybe worth restoring the BIOS Defaults and reconfigure it from scratch, disabling all the things you don't need on your FreeNAS server.

 

[praecorloth]

Sounds good. I'll keep plunking away at updating the BIOS.

When I say I can't get it to update, what I mean is I have updates, I put them on a CD (because that's where it wants to look for them) and then it refuses to actually see the files on the CD.

 

[paleoN]

When I say I can't get it to update, what I mean is I have updates, I put them on a CD (because that's where it wants to look for them) and then it refuses to actually see the files on the CD.

1. Download the BIOS update for DOS & the Afudos tool
2. Copy both to a bootable DOS USB stick, ideally Win 98 SE (FreeDOS should work fine as well)
3. Update the BIOS.

 

[praecorloth]

Alright, I did get the BIOS updated finally. FreeDOS wouldn't boot either, however the EZ Flash utility was able to find the update on the USB drive. So that was nice. Unfortunately it had no effect on how far FreeNAS will get.

Edit:
I stand corrected. My little CF/IDE adapter was the culprit.