Boot issue with FreeNAS v9.3

[Papasmerf]

I have recently installed FreeNAS v9.3 stable on an older HP DL320s G1. There was no issue with the install process, everything seemed to run fine. There were no errors and everything completed as expected. I am installing to a Kingston 8gb USB thumb drive plugged into the internal connector. I have used this same rig with the older FreeNAS v9.2 without any issue. I have tried doing a clean install as well as GUI upgrade from 9.2. In both cases when the system reboots after the install I receive the below error message. I have tried all of the bios settings I can think of and still have the same problem. Any ideas would be greatly appreciated.

 

[dlavigne]

Does your BIOS have anything like this?

If the system BIOS does not support EFI with BIOS emulation, see if it has an option to boot using legacy BIOS mode.

 

[Joe Indigenous]

I have tried the new FreeNAS 9.3 on two older servers and neither boots off. GPT formatted USB sticks seem to be the culprit.

The symptoms: Either via GUI, or via USB boot or via CD boot (everything works), I do "install" FreeNAS ver 9.3 on the USB stick. While booting, the machine hangs at the non-blinking cursor and never boots. The USB stick has been created, is a perfect one, i.e. it is able to boot at newer machines. Various USB stick brands and sizes have been tried ( like idVendor=14cd, idProduct=121f , 8.04 GB/7.49 GiB), so this is certainly not the issue.

About the cursor - this is precisely the moment when the stage 1 bootloader should be launched. Instead of this, *nothing* happens. The machine will not freeze - CTRL-ALT-DEL helps, but there is no boot. The message "no suitable video mode" characteristic to GPT menu, will never appear. Using ENTER or other keys for "sleep" boot won't help.

The issue very evidently is in the principal inability of the older hardware to boot GPT sticks. At the same time, the hardware is absolutely capable to boot normal "ISO" sticks.

Machine no 1: HP/Compaq ML-350 G4p. BIOS version D19 02/15/2006. Very naturally - (U)EFI was not the mainstream artefact these years. BIOS has no option to tweak, at least HP SPP 2012.01.0 includes no upgrade for the particular BIOS. (Needless to say, but some purists think they are wiser asking irrelevant questions - 12GB of ECC mem, 5x2TB disks in pool, HP P600 card, FreeNAS 9.2.1.9 works brilliantly. The particular HW has been used 24/7 for FreeNAS over a year, so far no complaints).

To be even more precise - After F9/F10/F11 prompt, there is a little timeout, then two fast beeps as normal, but then (instead of the usual"Attempting to boot from CD") nothing happens, only a non-blinking cursor stays visible (and forever so).

Machine no 2: Fujitsu Siemens RX300 S3. The same behaviour - the server will start CD and is able to correctly create the GPT stick (it boots on newer HW). However, due to a known HW bug, it seems to be impossible to install from USB to USB on this hardware - only lower frontside USB connector is fully usable.

I am afraid I have to say out a very unpopular thought (I even registered as the forum user to do so) - it seems that the decision to use GPT layout on the USB stick was a bit of premature. It breaks booting on the otherwise normal legacy servers of a certain period. To use a dedicated SSD for booting is theoretically possible but painful.

My proposal is: somebody should amend the documentation saying it in clear and open - the premature decision of using GPT boot sticks has the unpleasant outcome that old servers of certain period (most likely 2004-2007) cannot boot these sticks and are thus out of the FreeNAS game.

Seems that the phenomena is not so unknown: https://forums.freenas.org/index.php?threads/tried-9-3-back-to-9-2-1-9.25560/ . The citation: "We suspect, but cannot prove, that a number of older motherboards (with older BIOSes that cannot deal with GPT labels) and/or older USB sticks that lock up under ZFS may be the culprit, but like I said, we've never seen it.". I very much hope someone is able to explain the phenomena of not booting GPT sticks more scientifically.

(Aside from the story, I am already using FreeNAS 9.3 on a newer machine. For my simple home installation, I haven't yet seen bugs.)

 

[Joe Indigenous]

So. Me myself asking, me myself answering. Others can google and joy ;)

Bloody luck - the Siemens Fujitsu RX300 S3 is out of suspicion now - it *does* boot FreeNAS 9.3. How to make it workin' - it's simple. It was written somewhere that LSI controllers are to be silenced. Well, this is only half of the truth. When silencing an LSI controller (such 1068 as RX300 has on the motherboard) then BIOS re-reads all possible boot sources. You can do it otherwise - do power off the server *completely* - which, as long as servers are discussed, seems exctremely counterintuitive :) Actually - even taking the USB stick out and sticking IN again ... possibly into a different port - sometimes works. But not always. Silencing the LSI controller (no BIOS, OS only) and then back, works more reliably. Once a stick has started to boot the RX-300, it will forever :)

Thus the issue with RX300 was that user has to manipulate the stick as long until its name appears on the boot screen - as the next line to the CR-ROM. Only when one sees the USB stick mentioned near the CD-ROM, one can be sure the server will boot from it. One should not forget servers have ILO etc processors ... which can remember the wrong reality ;)

(I omit the long story about systematically trying out all 4 USB ports, playing with 4 different sticks and modifying the CHS according to Rod Smith.) However, the truth was simple - shock the motherboard until you get what you want ;) It seems to me that the USB handling culture is in charge for half of the mishaps.

Another neat trick I very much recommend is to use some little USB hub for the purpose. I use a 10-port Logilink hub. It compensates the lack of LEDs on modern cheap USB sticks.

However, the situation is still unsolved with ML-350 G4p. This bestia has a very ancient BIOS. One cannot exclude any target from the boot, only change the booting order. I'll try with 3 sticks tomorrow ;)

 

[cyberjock]

Just so you don't feel ignored I just want to say something about GPT booting. It was done as a stop-gap for the ZFS booting (unless I am mistaken the only way to boot ZFS is via GPT). To be frank, if your hardware is so old it won't boot with GPT it really isn't something that should be used with FreeNAS anyway. I'm sure you'd agree that supporting hardware from 10 years ago is a bit of a stretch (and shouldn't necessarily be expected as our minimum hardware requirements say 8GB of RAM and few systems from 10 years ago could even support 8GB of RAM). When looking at old hardware it is important to keep in mind that you are needing hardware that supports 64-bit (which wasn't supported by Intel until June 2004) and you don't want to deal with a FSB with ZFS (which Intel didn't offer until Nov 2008) and you don't want to deal with incompatible hardware or hardware that is no longer supported (this is very open to interpretation). In any case, once you look at those dates you'll find the most common denominator is Nov 2008.

At some point the "old" has to be replaced. That's just a natural course of things. The choice was to either remove support for the old or deny the newer hardware some of the amazing features that make 9.3 so awesome. Frankly, I'm okay with the fact that some old hardware doesn't do GPT. I can tell you that my old X58 based board (released Nov 2008) works just fine with FreeNAS 9.3. That's 6 years old, and is about the oldest I'd recommend because it was the first Intel chipset that had no FSB. I won't even go into AMD because they not only aren't recommended for compatibility reasons but I'm not an expert in AMD, so I'll leave those kinds of discussions to someone with more knowledge than myself.

Not to throw you to the dogs (get it.. my profile pict... eh, I'm not funny today) but if you wanted a boot device that doesn't do GPT you could easily code it in yourself. You probably aren't a programmer yourself though or you would likely know about these limitations with GPT and such, but there are decisions to be made and I'm okay with them obsoleting the old so I can enjoy the new.

If you do want to use the old, NAS4Free is probably better suited for your tastes. Feel free to check it out if you want to use it. :)

 

[eire1274]

A lot of info here that is helping me.

For the record, my server is based on the Asus AM1M-A mainboard, with the latest BIOS (quite recent), yet I was having the same result, unbootable images regardless if I was using the SSD or a USB2 disk.

I'm looking at legacy booting in the BIOS in detail, and I will comment later if it works. I'm wondering if it's the budget aspect of this mainboard that, even though it is current, it is seeing old problems.

System, in detail:

Asus AM1M-A
AMD Athlon 5350
2x Corsair ECC Unbuffered 8Gb 1600Mhz DDR3 (yes, AM1 does support ECC-U provided there is BIOS support)
KingSpec 16GB SATA-III SSD / Sandisk Cruzer Fit 8GB
plus a bunch of eSATA external storage

 

[eire1274]

With the CSM (Compatibility Support Module) on, set to UEFI+Legacy (default), Legacy only, UEFI only, the problem persists. With CSM off, the disk can't even be registered properly to boot and I get flung back into BIOS.

Looks like I'm sticking with 9.2.1.9 until an alternative to GPT booting is enabled at installation, or a workaround can be found.

 

[eire1274]

Okay, the problem is that Asus just didn't seem to build their UEFI boot manager to work with anything other than NORMAL WINDOWS-LIKE MBRs. The answer from Asus was a simple "Linux is not supported." Well, this ain't exactly Linux, but... anyway.

So know I'm looking for a boot manager I can stick on the thumb drive to act as a go-between to let the system get back to the GPT partition. Suggestions?

 

[eire1274]

Looks like an alternative USB disk loaded with Grub2 is the way to go. Looks like the idea is to set up a Grub2 profile that boots to the GPT, so in your case you'd need one boot USB with Grub2 and one USB to host FreeNAS.

My server is under use right now so I won't be able to try this until later.

 

[Ericloewe]

But FreeNAS does use Grub 2.

 

[eire1274]

I'm aware of that. However FreeNAS's Grub2 is on the GPT listed boot, which I can't address due to the UEFI/BIOS limitation. So I'm trying to build a new Grub2 point that CAN boot, and then reference the GPT to actually boot FreeNAS.

 

[eire1274]

I'm reading through "bug" reports, all with the same symptoms, unable to attach to GPT. And the general response is "9.3 and above will require UEFI, and will no longer support older hardware."

I'm not a fan of this, as my mainboard is new and still in production, and is not the only UEFI-based board that is having this problem. This needs to be put in the FAQ immediately, e.g. "your mainboard must support GPT!" Not knowing this has turned my easy upgrade into a mad scramble to get things working again.

 

[Schilzy]

Hey guys
Im in the same boat as everyone here. I just got a computer off a family member that is only 2 years old that im turing into a server and as a result i would expect that 9.3 would work on that machine. I think it is poor form by FreeNAS not to have it supported, i know that it is probably based off old tech but if i can still get it today in a "brand new" computer straight off the shelf it should be supported end of story.

9.2 here i come

 

[SPe]

In case you are interested. I have the same problem, but I use the FreeNAS 9.3 installer on a USB stick to boot from it first, which works. Then I choose reboot and right when it starts to boot again, I plug out the USB stick with the installer and FreeNAS 9.3 boots from a second USB stick which is plugged in to the second USB port. Maybe this helps until a solution is found.