32GB USB as Install Disk Fails?

[jlpellet]

Since 11.2 release, I've tried to image the ISO to a 32GB USB flash drive from Win 7 on 4 drives, from 2 systems, using 3 different imagewriters (Win32DiskImager, Windows USB/DVD Tool, & Etcher) & Win 7 blue screens on creation every time or any time the disk is inserted after imaging. I didn't have any smaller flash drives to try (on the way) but assume Win 7 does not like the image file structure on such a large disk. On earlier releases (e.g., 11.1) I used smaller disks (4-8 GB) without problem. I'll follow up with more info when I get a smaller disk to try. I've not had a chance to look at the subject drives in Linux or MacOS systems. Any ideas/suggestions appreciated.

 

[Chris Moore]

Hardware?

Updated Forum Rules 12/5/18
https://forums.freenas.org/index.php?threads/updated-forum-rules-12-5-18.45124/

 

[jlpellet]

I did not provide any FreeNAS system info as it did not seem germane to creating an instal flash drive on Windows. One system tried was an Intel(R) Core(TM) i3-2100 CPU @ 3.10GHz (4 cores) with 8GB non-ECC RAM running 11.2 Release, but the usb drive behavior was verified on 2 FreeNAS systems. Again, the question relates to the Windows 7 bewhavior with a 11.2 install image to a 32GB USB flash drive (3 brands) versus prior experience with 4 & 8 GB flash drives. In past behavior, Win 7 created the image without issue so I'm not sure if someting changed in the partition types created for the image (possibly related to the change in bootloader from GRUB to FreeBSD) or the larger drives, or both.

 

[Ericloewe]

32 GB is plenty.

Win 7 blue screens on creation every time or any time the disk is inserted after imaging

With all of those tools? Great, that's going to be a pain...

You can also try USB Image Tool, which I've had good luck with.

 

[jlpellet]

I put one of the 32GB flash disks ina linux mint system & it reported bad blocks in the partition & refused to mount it. gparted on mint seemed to not see it.

 

[Ericloewe]

gparted on mint seemed to not see it.

Can't it even see the disk to nuke all the partition tables?

 

[Jurgen Segaert]

Win 7 blue screens on creation every time or any time the disk is inserted after imaging

I also had those "instant blue screens" happen. This is not caused by the image-writer tool, but is rather a "Windows 7" feature. Those USBs work fine in Windows 10. There's a workaround here:

https://forums.freebsd.org/threads/blue-screen-of-death-when-insert-freebsd-usb-stick.62230/

 

[jlpellet]

Thanks for the FreeBSD tip. When I first plugged in to a Mint system, gparted could not see it. From terminal, fdisk could see it & let me delete all partitions. However, when I recreated a FAT32 partition, Mint sees it fine but Win 7 does not see it as a volume/disk (i.e., loads driver but never appears as a disk to the system).

 

[jlpellet]

It looks like this is a fatal combination of a bug in the FreeBSD base image and the Windows 7 GPT handler. For more info see the link above as well as the 2 below. Not sure what my fix is when creating usb's from images in Win 7 but will report if a smaller USB drives helps/solves but based on the links I do not expect it to help.
https://github.com/balena-io/etcher/issues/1839
https://lists.freebsd.org/pipermail/freebsd-stable/2015-November/083645.html

 

[Jurgen Segaert]

I found that the USB image, in my case burned with Win32DiskImager, was still bootable and usable to install FreeNAS (or native FreeBSD, I don't recall).
The issue was that afterwards when I tried to repurpose that USB stick on a Windows 7 box, it crashed that machine as soon that USB stick was inserted. The way to salvage it, was to reformat/wipe the partition table using a different OS.

 

[Apollo]

I had good success starting my PC into recovery mode (either through Windows recovery process) or boot with a recovery disk.
Then I would be able to run "Diskpart" with the "Clean" command on the drive that has existing partition such as Grub.

 

[jlpellet]

On Win32DiskImager (& others I tried), for me, when it completes the verify step, immediate BSOD. In some research, it looks like I could burn it from FreeNAS with the command below.
dd if=imagename of=/dev/??? bs=10240 where ??? is the destination

 

[jlpellet]

Following up, as promised, smaller drives behave the same. As best I can tell, a FreeNAS 11.2x image on a thumb drive immediately crashes Windows 7 and cannot be mounted in Linux Mint 19 because the base FreeBSD image has a misplaced secondary GPT, i.e., this is NOT just a Windows 7 problem. Is this image issue something that should get a bug report in FreeNAS or not because the root issue is from FreeBSD. Advice appreciated. Thanks!