SOLVED Asrock Q1900M motherboard boot issues

[ErikOfData]

I built a light weight system using the Asrock Q1900M motherboard and am having serious boot issues. When the system boots from power off state I get GRUB menu with 5 second count down to launch the FreeNAS target. This part works correctly. When the FreeNAS kernel starts to load I get a checksum failure.

I am using a USB stick, 8G PNY, for the boot image. There are two strange behaviors I observed. First, I get the same error with a clean install on a SATA drive as I get on the USB stick, thus I believe there is an issue with the BIOS. Second, if I enter the BIOS and then exit the system boots perfect. I can reboot indefinitely and I still get a perfect boot. If I power cycle, then boot fails after GRUB menu. If I power cycle and enter the BIOS and exit, then the system boots correctly.

The Asrock Q1900M motherboard has UEFI BIOS. I have legacy support enabled and I have tried lots of settings to no improvement.

My objective is to run the server headless, but due to having to enter the BIOS each time the power cycles makes things difficult.

Everything I have described occurs using version FreeNAS-9.3-RELEASE.iso dated 12/30/2014 and FreeNAS-9.3-CURRENT-201503130047.iso.

Any ideas to get the system to boot without going through the BIOS?

 

[cyberjock]

Sorry, I can't help you much. Not only is that a desktop board, it's got a Celeron CPU, lots of proprietary stuff on the board, and a Realtek NIC. You'll probably find at the end of all of this that you should have bought compatible hardware.

I do wish you luck though.

 

[ErikOfData]

Figured out how to beat this boot issue.

I narrowed the issue down to the motherboard since no matter what Unix distro I install I was getting the same behavior. I completed a RMA exchange of the board and to my disbelief the same behavior was present in the replacement. The Asrock Q1900M motherboard appears to have an issue with how video RAM is allocated at boot time.

If in the BIOS under "Chipset Configuration" you set "Primary Graphics Adapter" to Onboard and "Shared Memory" to 512MB the board boots correctly from powered off state. Therefore there is no issue with FreeNAS 9.3.

For reference, my configuration is:
* Asrock Q1900M
* Two Intel EXP19301CT Gig nics ( link aggregation )
* StarTech PEXSAT34RH SATA3 4 port
* 430 Watt power supply
* Two 1TB WD Red drives ( mirrored )
* Two 2TB WD Green drives ( spanned )
* USB 8G stick

Cheap and really low power NAS !!

 

[Ericloewe]

Cheap and really low power NAS !!

If you don't value your data...

 

[cyberjock]

Well, that board isn't recommended by us to begin with (it's a desktop board), so I'm not the least bit surprised you had problems just booting. Hopefully you won't have other issues some day that cause data loss, etc.

 

[marbus90]

I shall assume that a Lenovo TS140 or Dell T20 would have been cheaper with ECC support.

Your money.

 

[ErikOfData]

If you don't value your data...

This box is all about operating costs, my friend.

I live in the San Francisco Bay Area where power costs are freaking insane. If my power usage hits the 4th tier I will be paying 45 cents a kilo watt. I have many internet of things that need a place to park data. And FreeNAS enables me to manage my storage needs for these devices easily. And best of all, this box lets me do it at a very low operating cost. It takes a dump, so what. Just having fun.

 

[cyberjock]

I hereby christen you ErikOfLostData. :p

Edit: Don't get upset. It was meant as a fun joke. I saw "ErikOfData" and it made me think of medieval times. :P