WARNING: FreeNAS 11.2 Flash drive crashes Windows 7 computers on insertion

bmercer

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This has been mentioned before both here and on other forums, but I think the issue is serious enough that it deserves a prominent warning on the FreeNAS ISO download page. I'm not asking for a bug fix, I'm asking for a warning on the download page letting people know that a FreeNAS install flash drive might crash their Windows 7 computer.

If a USB flash drive with FreeNAS 11.2 installed on it is inserted into a Windows 7 computer, it can cause an immediate BSOD, usually a STOP 0x000000001 (APC_INDEX_MISMATCH.)

I have spent several frustrating hours troubleshooting, done a lot of testing, and read multiple posts on various forums talking about this issue. It seems clear that this is due to a bug in Windows 7, probably related to improperly interpreting the GPT partition.

Here's what I know...
  • This is NOT a bug in one specific imaging program. It is NOT an issue with Etcher, or Rufus, or with the platform the flash drive is burned on.
  • I personally have reproduced the problem using Rufus, Etcher, and Win32DiskImager. Others have reproduced the issue with these and other packages, including dd on Linux and Mac OS.
  • This is NOT a problem with the flash drive hardware. It's easily reproducible on many different brands and sizes of drives.
  • The crash is NOT directly caused by the imaging software or imaging process. The crash happens after imaging is complete and the OS tries to mount the volume. A FreeNAS 11.2 flash drive created on a Windows 10, Macintosh, or Linux box will still crash a Windows 7 machine when inserted, and one created on a Windows 7 machine will NOT crash a different OS.
  • So far, every single Windows 7 computer I have tried has crashed immediately on inserting one of these flash drives. Obviously there's potential for serious abuse here.
  • Similar problems have been reported in the past when users tried to insert flash drives with FreeBSD-related images on them on Windows 7 machines.
  • I doubt Microsoft will ever fix this.
  • Lots of other people are going to experience this problem, and incorrectly blame either the imaging software, or their flash drive, or FreeNAS itself
Therefore I think a warning message on the download page would be appropriate. I know Windows 7 is old, but it still has significant share in the market, and we're basically talking about possible data loss from a trivial action.

I think a warning message on the download page would save some people a lot of frustration.
 

Tigersharke

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This seems reasonable to me, but its up to "higher powers" to add the message.

Could auto-mount on the Win7 machine be disabled in order to avoid this? There seems to be some broken logic if it is assumed by Win7 that *any* stick imaged on the machine should be mounted immediately after. I would hope there is some way to disable this broken feature because it is so completely dangerous, not simply for a crash-- remember when Microsoft thought it would be great to automatically start executables?
 

Chris Moore

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At this point, nobody should be using Windows 7 for anything. Take that machine out and Burn it.
 

Tigersharke

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At this point, nobody should be using Windows 7 for anything. Take that machine out and Burn it.
I'm absolutely not a Windows advocate but I certainly am not going to buy Windows 10 (or any other) to run it in a VM or VirtualBox, especially if I already own Win7 which ought to work fine for games of that era and before, my only real need of Windows at all.
 

ThreeDee

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I'm absolutely not a Windows advocate but I certainly am not going to buy Windows 10 (or any other) to run it in a VM or VirtualBox, especially if I already own Win7 which ought to work fine for games of that era and before, my only real need of Windows at all.
welp .. even games, you're gonna have to upgrade to 10 .. sooner rather than later .. use your same Win 7 key (if its' legit) and you can install 10 with it... but this is the wrong forums for this debate I suppose.
 

Tigersharke

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welp .. even games, you're gonna have to upgrade to 10 .. sooner rather than later .. use your same Win 7 key (if its' legit) and you can install 10 with it... but this is the wrong forums for this debate I suppose.
Certainly for the new ones, but old things from the 80's (if obtainable) or 90's should work fine. I'd use XP for those except that the CD I had for it was lent and never returned. I only ever bought the two.
 

bmercer

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At this point, nobody should be using Windows 7 for anything. Take that machine out and Burn it.
While Windows 7 is definitely on its way out, it's still got a year before EOL, and right now, today, it's a supported OS with a huge installed base. In fact, even though Windows 10 came out in 2015, Windows 7 was STILL the most popular OS until January of this year, when Windows 10 FINALLY exceeded it in market share. Ignoring such a huge percentage of the ecosystem seems a bit silly. I won't comment on how silly it is to physically destroy hardware simply because of the OS it's running.
 

bmercer

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This seems reasonable to me, but its up to "higher powers" to add the message.

Could auto-mount on the Win7 machine be disabled in order to avoid this?
It's possible to disable auto-mounting of volumes in Windows, but I'm not sure if that will help in this case. I'm going to test it.
 

HoneyBadger

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Certainly for the new ones, but old things from the 80's (if obtainable) or 90's should work fine. I'd use XP for those except that the CD I had for it was lent and never returned. I only ever bought the two.
At that point they might be old enough that running them in WINE (or depending on the vintage, FreeDOS) would work better than 7. But Windows 7 was still a fine OS and the last shot at having a Microsoft OS that didn't look like it wants to pretend to be a mobile touchscreen device for the iPhone crowd.

But to digress from this tangent and get back on topic - I just put an 11.2-U3 flash drive into a Windows 7 system and it did absolutely nothing. Didn't even ask me to format the drive. Diskpart sees the GPT partitions fine. Not sure what people are on about.
 

bmercer

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But to digress from this tangent and get back on topic - I just put an 11.2-U3 flash drive into a Windows 7 system and it did absolutely nothing. Didn't even ask me to format the drive. Diskpart sees the GPT partitions fine. Not sure what people are on about.

Is there some particular reason you think I'm lying? I came on this forum and made up some ridiculous story just to ruin your day?

I've got to say I'm a bit disappointed at the hostility I'm encountering about this.
I have clearly documented a real issue and provided what seems a perfectly reasonable recommendation, and I'm getting told to set my computer on fire and that the problem doesn't exist.

Clearly I wasted my time coming here.
 

jgreco

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Is there some particular reason you think I'm lying? I came on this forum and made up some ridiculous story just to ruin your day?

I've got to say I'm a bit disappointed at the hostility I'm encountering about this.
I have clearly documented a real issue and provided what seems a perfectly reasonable recommendation, and I'm getting told to set my computer on fire and that the problem doesn't exist.

Clearly I wasted my time coming here.

That's not actually how the discussion went. The very first thing said was:

This seems reasonable to me, but its up to "higher powers" to add the message.

The discussion then evolved beyond that into more debate on issues both direct and tangential:

Could auto-mount on the Win7 machine be disabled in order to avoid this? There seems to be some broken logic if it is assumed by Win7 that *any* stick imaged on the machine should be mounted immediately after. I would hope there is some way to disable this broken feature because it is so completely dangerous, not simply for a crash-- remember when Microsoft thought it would be great to automatically start executables?

etc. You probably should not consider the forum to be composed of a bunch of developers who are going to be laser-focused on your issue and work diligently on mitigating a Microsoft BSOD. The forum is actually composed of a bunch of NAS enthusiasts who have relatively little to do with the development of FreeNAS, and are likely to have a wide variety of opinions on "that evil Microsoft."

Please try to understand that the people here cannot directly do what you seem to be expecting, and that the natural activity on a forum is to discuss stuff. It frequently goes off the rails. The moderators are happy to guide it back when appropriate. Nobody's calling you a liar (or maybe I just read too fast?)

I would suggest that you might want to file a bug report if you really want to get the attention of the developers. Even though we probably agree that this isn't technically a bug, that's the mechanism that software developers use to track issues like this, and it is much more likely to end up with a warning posted on the download page if you file a bug report.
 

Chris Moore

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I'm absolutely not a Windows advocate but I certainly am not going to buy Windows 10 (or any other) to run it in a VM or VirtualBox, especially if I already own Win7 which ought to work fine for games of that era and before, my only real need of Windows at all.
The question is about a physical system that reboots because a USB stick is plugged into it. Do what you want with your VM.
 

Chris Moore

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I've got to say I'm a bit disappointed at the hostility I'm encountering about this.
Not hostile. Just don't like Windows.
 

Chris Moore

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HoneyBadger

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Is there some particular reason you think I'm lying? I came on this forum and made up some ridiculous story just to ruin your day?

I've got to say I'm a bit disappointed at the hostility I'm encountering about this.
I have clearly documented a real issue and provided what seems a perfectly reasonable recommendation, and I'm getting told to set my computer on fire and that the problem doesn't exist.

Clearly I wasted my time coming here.

I'm being blunt, not hostile.

The fact that I don't see this error on my Windows 7 machine suggests that it isn't necessarily Windows itself that has the fault; yes, perhaps there's a very common piece of hardware that causes this. Grabbing something like BlueScreenView and identifying the faulted driver might provide some assistance in narrowing it down.

Putting aside malicious hardware (wiring data lines to a capacitor) there shouldn't be a "device side" reason that inserting a USB drive would cause a BSOD/stop. The error in your original post specifically seems to reflect a piece of software that's didn't properly manage entry/exit from a guarded or critical region of kernel memory; that's not specific to a FreeBSD partition existing on the device, it's more likely to reflect a poorly coded device driver on the part of the USB host controller or perhaps the device itself if it installs a specific one.
 

Chris Moore

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jlpellet

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My research shows this is due to an issue in the FreeBSD ISO GPT structure since GRUB was replaced. I had a similar issue when FreeNAS migrated to the base FreeBSD that changed from GRUB. At that time, as I recall, from FreeBSD forums, I found that FreeBSD implemented a GPT partition structure that was NOT standard when Windows 7 was released AND MS has no plans to update Win 7 32-bit, but has done so for Win10 & Win7 64-bit. Linux did tools may report the issue if an install USB is tested. My fix was to burn install drives from MacOS or Linux. For more info, see, for example, the links below.
https://lists.freebsd.org/pipermail/freebsd-stable/2015-November/083645.html
https://forums.freebsd.org/threads/blue-screen-of-death-when-insert-freebsd-usb-stick.62230/
Hope this helps.
John
 

macatarere

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Thanks John, you have solved my Win7-64 BSOD, 11.2-U6 now running on an Intel S3420GP. I had to install from a DVD, no luck with macOS and etcher. Boots fine from mirrored USB drives.
 

macatarere

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No Win7-64 BSOD with 11.3-BETA1 or TrueCommand-1.1, used Etcher.

Requiring a DVD install appears to be an Intel S3420GP issue (not latest, ~2011 BIOS). USB install fails with 'Mounting from cd9660:iso9660/FREENAS failed with error2; retrying...'
 
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