after install mobo post hangs on 50h initialize usb keyboard & mouse

[chrischuter]

Hi all - from a rank FreeNasNoob

HW:
gigabyte ga-ex58-ud5
8Gb ddr3 133Mhz ram
(I have a small sata drive attached for experimentation before lashing out on drives for a RAID).

8Gb Sandisk Cruzer (Installer usb drive) prepared with Freenas-11.0-U4.iso using Rufus on my Win 10 machine.
16Gb Sandisk Cruzer (OS Installation usb drive)

The installation goes fine all the way to the end. Shut down the pc and remove the 8Gb installer drive.

On restart, the POST hangs at 50 which is the 'initialize usb keyboard & mouse' stage.

This happens whether I use the usb Kb/Mse Combo OR PS/2 kb.

I know there have been probs with sandisk pendrives but I have proved these two drives exhaustively.

I think that there may be a problem with the 16Gb drive after the freenas os has been installed to it. When I try to explore it, Windows (diskpart) sees two partitions of unknown type (neither primary nor extended) and I assume that any files are in a ZFS format. In any event, Win 10 asks to format the partitions.

I have checked out the forums and cannot find a reference to this problem; I've also googled it to death with very few clues.

Can any of you more experienced freeNassers suggest where to go from here? I'm loath to buy a new mobo as I started the project after pulling this venerable one from the back of a shelf!.....

 

[nightshade00013]

Well it's hanging in the BIOS so there could be an issue in your settings or with the drive in particular. It could also need a BIOS update. This is some sort of issue in the BIOS however as it doesn't recognize something correctly or something is causing it to hang somewhere so do not restrict your search to just the FreeNAS forums, search the web for your issue and MoBo model.

A quick search says

The most common causes:
1. Corrupted BIOS/clear or Update if needed
2. Media in the ODD (DVD/BR) eject it or change boot order
3. Bad SSD/HDD/MOBO test disconnect 'other' drives or use a donor HDD from another PC to boot
4. Shorting

Yes the drives are ZFS formatted so windows will not be able to read anything and it's not even worth looking.

You should probably think about a different MoBo however as the one you have is for a gaming computer not a server.

 

[chrischuter]

thanks for that, nightshade00013.

I've dealt with the first three of those common causes: I updated the BIOS sometime ago to F13j so I have now dropped it back to F10 but with no success. I might try an even earlier version.

There are no media drives other than I described earlier and I have swapped out known good usb drives.

later::
I have now downloaded an img.xz file, burned it to the 16Gb usb drive with Rufus and plugged it in. It booted straight away headlessly and I am able to reach the interface with my browser:

Hostname freenas.local Edit
Build FreeNAS-9.2.1.5-RELEASE-x64 (80c1d35)
Platform Intel(R) Xeon(R) CPU X5560 @ 2.80GHz
Memory 4072MB
System Time Mon Oct 23 14:47:48 PDT 2017
Uptime 2:47PM up 4 mins, 0 users
Load Average 0.12, 0.50, 0.28

I have spent many hours trying to get the iso installer to work and this img method took less than 30minutes! Being a nosey type, I will have to crack the problem but it doesn't look like a mobo although as you can see above, only 4Gb is being reported when ther's 8Gb installed...

 

[Inxsible]

only 4Gb is being reported when ther's 8Gb installed...

Try and reseat both the memory sticks. Sometimes that will fix things and you should see the entire 8GB RAM.


Also are you saying that FreeNAS 9.2.1.5 worked when FreeNAS 11.0-U4 wouldn't? In that case, see my point about the memory sticks. 8GB RAM is now required for FreeNAS, so that could be why it hangs when you try to install FreeNAS 11.

 

[chrischuter]

Thanks for that, Inxsible. I will work on your idea of the memory preventing v11 from starting. You may have seen that I was going to try a different bios version. This is because F13 reports the full 8Gb while F12 is only showing 4Gb. However, FNas 9.2.1.5 would ONLY work with the F12 bios. When I dropped it back to F9, the mobo wouldn't boot and I had to use the dual bios facility to recover the board. Mad or what? I think there is the possibility of a bent pin or 3 but I daren't pull the cpu out for fear of really wrecking it. Nightshade00013 rightly commented that I should use a different board but I can't justify the expense for a small intranet, plus the board has gazillions of sata and usb ports and will, i'm sure be very stable if I can find the right recipe. Tomorrow, I will install win10 to prove that all is working properly and then try again. Thanks for your thoughts.

 

[nightshade00013]

The bad thing is that board also has a realtek NIC. So once you do possibly get it up and running you will just have something else that is going to give you grief down the road.

The USB ports count really doesn't help since if you are booting via USB it will take what two ports for two USB drives. If you have something in mind to use external HDD's then feel free to search around the problems with them. And the board has decent number of SATA ports but some of those are achieved through a port multiplier, most server boards have at least six SATA ports and some run in the neighborhood of ten, others have SAS controllers built in and you end up with a total of fourteen drive connectors.

I know it seems like a lot of money to begin with but a used X8DT6 or X8DTI supermicro board will take the cpu you have and be perfectly happy.

Not to mention that the board you are using does not support ECC ram which is another roll of the dice... I wish you well but please keep VERY good backups of anything you store on what you are building or be willing to lose anything you store on it.

https://www.gigabyte.com/Motherboard/GA-EX58-UD5-rev-10#sp

2 x JMB322 chips (Smart Backup):

• 4 x SATA 3Gb/s connectors (GSATA2_0, GSATA2_1, GSATA2_2, GSATA2_3) supporting up to 4 SATA 3Gb/s devices (Note 4)

(Note 4) A JMB322 chip supports two SATA 3Gb/s connectors, so the four SATA 3Gb/s connectors are divided into to two pairs: GSATA2_0 and GSATA2_1 as a pair and GSATA2_2 and GSATA2_3 as a pair.

http://www.hardwaresecrets.com/datasheets/JMB322.pdf

The JMicron JMB322 is a single chip, 1 to 2-port Serial ATA II Port Multiplier with RAID function support. It is designed to provide SATA port expansion, data protection and performance aggregation at various applications.

The more I read on the board you have the more I cringe to think it will be used with FreeNAS.

 

[chrischuter]

I'm now sure you're right despite having given it my best efforts to resolve. Thing is, I might be like a few people new to this; if we were talking critical data, multiple users and so on, then I would simply buy a ready-built solution. I'm here because I've got a d-link 2-disk nas that I've been using for 2 years. They are 3Tb and not raided and I could afford to lose the lot tomorrow. The fan is constantly on and I'm sure that it will all pack up before too long. My last project was a triple-boot Hackintosh-Win10-Linux which I completed last year and I'm sure you'll be aware of the donkey's hours of frustration that entailed! It's been running for a year now and is very stable in all three os' so I'm happy to flog away at this NAS problem mostly because of what I will learn. Since I'm retired, I have plenty of time to play.

I'm looking for a project to house 2x4Tb Raid 1 and the two 3Tb stand-alones if they survive. It needs to stream media to max 4 devices simultaneously on my intranet and be able to provide an FTP server for various files. It needs to store a few recovery images for the various os' I have. I also need to be able to schedule or set up cron jobs to backup a small amount of crucial stuff to my domain host - a job which I do by hand at the moment.

On a technical note, the server boards you recommend are dual cpu but I'm not sure, even after a bit of reading, how I could ever expand to a second cpu to my advantage on a simple gigabit LAN. If that were the case, then the expense seems difficult to justify. When doing my early reading on the nas subject, it seemed that you could dig out any old board from under the stairs and move the Earth!!

Thanks for listening to the rant, Nightshade00013. I need to go back and do more reading - and spend more time exploring this community.

 

[chrischuter]

To end this thread, I'll just post the cause of my woes: the double fault. I had both a faulty Sandisk Cruzer AND an intermittent fault on a memory module. I uncovered the problems when I installed Linux and ran the memtest which comes as part of the installation. Easy afterwards, but I should have thoroughly tested the board beforehand. Next, I shall add a few drives and learn to set up and admin a RAID and so on, then I shall be taking Nightshade00013's advice and find a better mobo bundle for the real thing. Thanks again.:)