Any way to stick a bootloader ahead of the FreeNAS installation?

[Reggie Burnett]

I'm having a hard time getting my Gigabyte P55m-ud2 board to boot from the usb after creating the installation. The installer usb drive (fat32) boots fine but when I restart and take it out (leaving just the installed flash drive) the system just hangs. My only guess is t hat it is trying to figure out if the usb key is bootable and is hanging.

I was thinking that maybe I could put some fat32 booter on a 32 gig flash drive and have the installed os be on the back side of the drive in a different set of partitions. The booter (maybe grub?) would simply start and then pass off the boot to the OS. With the first partition being fat32 my system may not lock up.

Stupid idea? Any idea how to make that work?

Thanks!

 

[m0nkey_]

It's likely the USB drive you're booting from is malfunctioning or your motherboard does not support booting from GPT partitions.

Also, I'd like to point out that your motherboard is not suitable to run FreeNAS. The Realtek NIC will let you down and will cause slow performance.

 

[Reggie Burnett]

It's likely the USB drive you're booting from is malfunctioning or your motherboard does not support booting from GPT partitions.

Also, I'd like to point out that your motherboard is not suitable to run FreeNAS. The Realtek NIC will let you down and will cause slow performance.

I'm running Ubuntu 16.04 on it now. I have two zfs pools on it. Will I have less network performance in FreeNAS than I will under Ubuntu 16.04 using that nic? Think Ubuntu has better network driver for the 8111D? This is a home server just for tv recording and plex serving. No office or enterprise use.

 

[Reggie Burnett]

I don't think the mobo would be the problem. I know that gpt disks can be supported on bios systems. As for the nic I could buy an intel gig card and avoid the realtek nic. I have tried 3 different usb flash drives so I don't malfunctioning drives are the problem.

I think with gpt partitioning for bios systems there is supposed to be a type of mbr at the head of the disk. I wonder if that is being written?

 

[Jailer]

When you say it "hangs" what does that mean? What error messages if any are your getting? Did you let it go for a bit? New installations can take a bit to boot.

Also please provide your entire system specs per the forum rules so we can offer some meaningful help.

 

[wblock]

My only guess is t hat it is trying to figure out if the usb key is bootable and is hanging.

That would be a very weird and unusual failure mode.

There is a PMBR in GPT partitioning to make it compatible with BIOS-only systems.

The installer is not FAT32 anyway, so this whole thing becomes more confusing.

Also, I suspect the Realtek card will not go any slower on FreeNAS than on Ubuntu. The lack is in the hardware, not the driver.

There are so many strange questions that we're all over the map. What version of FreeNAS did you install? Did you select BIOS booting in the installer?