SOLVED Booting from USB stick hangs

[Ian C]

Aloha,

I had previously gotten a FreeNAS install up and running using an SSD as the OS drive, but was advised this was, at best, wasteful. So, I took the suggestions here and ordered a SanDisk Cruzer and have been attempting to load FreeNAS 9.2.1.5 onto this. It boots to a a point, and then hangs.

- The drive is sitting in a USB 2.0 slot
- First attempt: used dd to write the image from my Mac. Put it into my NAS and booted. It hung at "Setting hostid [...]"
- Second attempt: Used the CD to install onto the USB stick on the NAS, rebooted, hung at the same point
- Third attempt: dd'd the image from linux onto the USB stick, same result.

Any clues? I've attached a picture of where the boot process gets to. I left it there over night without any change. Looking at the logs of the dhcpd server, the NAS isn't asking for an IP either, so no chance of seeing if the web interface might be accessible...

Thanks for any help!

 

[gpsguy]

How big is the flash drive? It needs to be at least 4Gb. If it is, then I'd try a different flash drive.

 

[Ian C]

It is 32Gb. I had asked for smaller, but the IT person in charge of purchasing apparently decided 32GB was a better deal. In other circumstances that would have been nice, but...

As way of an update, I just re-installed a fresh copy onto the SSD to make sure there wasn't some new bug introduced from going 9.2.1.3 -> 9.2.1.5. New install worked right off the bat...

 

[joeschmuck]

It's likely your USB flash drive. See about getting even an older 4 to 8GB drive if that is all you can find. Try to stay away from 16GB and higher for the boot device.

 

[Ian C]

Thanks, I ordered an 8Gb Cruzer this morning, so will see how it works out in a week or so when it arrives. In the meantime, if any other ideas pop up, let me know

 

[Ian C]

Well, the 8GB cruzer worked fine. I noticed this time that there were two options to boot off USB in BIOS: a normal one and a UEFI one. Did I pick the UEFI one last time? I don't remember. Seems dumb that the thumbdrive could have been *too* large... so maybe this was the problem.

I had a couple follow up problems. First, for some reason, even though it booted off my USB stick at first, it was somehow then booting off my old install on my SSD. I fixed this by booting the install CD, going to the shell and running "gpart destroy -F ada6" (ada6 being my ssd). This worked as expected and now I'm back to a fresh install.

Second problem was in benchmarking my NFS share I was getting a lot of stale mounts due to server disconnects. These were super annoying as they hung the whole system. I decided that a certain-person-not-to-be-named on this forum might have been right about compiling my own NIC drivers. This time I found a much more satisfactory option: apparently there exists an ELRepo repository for CentOS which has up-to-date drivers. Installed that, and no more stale mount problems. (Go ahead and say "I told you so" if you read this :p )

Finally, I ran my "totally useless" iozone benchmark before and after adding my SSD as a SLOG to my pool. Result? NFS writes went from 95MB/s -> 200MB/s! Noice. Reads holding steady at 300MB/s.

Ran a real world test (i.e. the code that will be using this setup) comparing my workstations native 4 drive RAID10 vs this NAS and they were pretty much neck and neck. Double noice.

Anyways, I guess this thread can be marked [SOLVED], but damned if I know how to do that..

 

[cyberjock]

Some motherboards have a problem that once you get to a certain "insert some arbitrarily large size USB stick size like 32GB" the BIOS changes the way it treats the disk. Kind of sucks since 32GB really isn't that big in the big picture. They go "oh.. 32GB? This *must* be a hard drive". Is it silly? Yes. Is it stupid? I think so. But they do what they do and we have to figure out how to get around it.

I tried a 64GB stick on my old socket 1366 based system and it worked flawlessly though. I usually go for the cheapest drive that I trust. My "go-to" is a Corsair Voyager. Typically 8GB is about $10 on newegg, so I just buy it and rock it out.