Boot to USB gets wiped

[Zachary Miller]

Hey All,

So I've been getting used to FreeNAS and love it so far. I put one in a client office using a small footprint supermicro server to do backups only. I used a USB stick to boot the OS and 2 WD hard drives mirrored for the backup data. I wanted to setup replication back to my office but didn't want to seed the data over the WAN, so I plugged in an external USB hard drive. The appliance sees it and I did a local replication to the USB drive. So far so good.

The problem would appear to be, on the next reboot, the USB key no longer has the OS or has become corrupt. I did this twice so far that after I plug in the external hard drive and did the replication, the USB key would no longer boot. I have used other USB keys, other USB ports, and am at a loss right now. I was hoping someone would have seen something similiar or can help explain what might be occurring. The only thing that makes sense to me is when I set up the external USB drive as a volume, it somehow wipes the USB key with the OS on it. I just can't seem to rap my head around why it does this. Any help would be greatly appreciated.

Thanks,
Zach

 

[dlavigne]

Are you sure it's not a boot order setting in the BIOS? What is the exact error you get when you boot?

 

[Zachary Miller]

Hey dlavigne,

Yes I have checked the BIOS boot order. The BIOS can see the USB stick and recognizes it. I don't get any "errors", all I get is that its a FreeNAS data disk and it can't boot to it. I have tried attaching the USB stick to a windows machine, but of course you can't read it. Is there anyway to mount that USB stick to see if the OS is still there or if it got wiped to verify?

Thanks,
Zach

 

[Knowltey]

Do you have the ability on that computer to attempt the install from optical media method? I had a computer recently that for whatever reason did not like booting if the USB drive in question was imaged with the USB .xz file and I resovled it by making a DVD and just using the machine itself to perform the installation to the USB media.

 

[gpsguy]

In addition to what Knowltey said, put the USB stick on your Windows machine and see if you can get boot it to boot off the USB drive. If it boots correctly there - then you know FreeNAS has been installed correctly on the flash drive.

 

[Zachary Miller]

I'm heading into the client's office today to play with this a bit so I'll let you all know what I figure out just in case anyone else runs into this. Thanks for all the tips thus far.