Cannot get Trunas Scale USB installer to boot on X8DTL-3F!

[CelticWebs]

I've been trying many things to get this to work and keep falling flat on my face!

I want to use an old SuperMicro JBOD as a storage server with Trunas Scale on it. The motherboard in it is a X8DTL-3F, I've found the latest Bios and updated it but I just can't get it to boot the USB to install. I had a similar issue with Proxmox, I can install V7 form USB but not V8. So it's likely a hardware limitation on eth USB bootloader.

I've attempted to copy the installer to an internal disk and boot that way, this also failed. It did however work to allow me to boot a basic DOS ISO to install the new Bios, so the idea had legs but it's a no go if I copy the ISO for the Trunas installer to the disk.

As far as I a see, it does not support UEFI boot, this is not mentioned anywhere in the BIOS. Does anyone have any suggestions how I can get this thing to boot and install Scale? I don't have much hair as it is and I'm quietly tearing whats left out!

Thanks for your thoughts!

 

[Ericloewe]

That stuff is pretty damn long in the tooth, are you sure it's worth your time?

You can always try doing the install on another machine and moving the boot disk over.

 

[CelticWebs]

I agree it's old, but for what I want it'll work fine as a bulk storage server.

I dind't think of installing on another machine and just swapping the drives to this one!

 

[PhilD13]

Have you verified in the BIOS South Bridge Configuration that USB is enabled and set properly?
You also may need to set the Boot Device Priority
possibly will need bring up the boot menu during booting to select the USB stick or try a different rear USB port.
Try a different USB port. It might not boot from USB on the one selected.
If it has IPMI it might be able from ipmi mount the iso as a bootable CD and reboot into it but the old boards with ipmi seem to be touchy about that method.
If your board has DOM, then you can install Truenas on a DOM and use the DOM as a boot device.

Scale will install on Legacy BIOS systems as I installed Scale Cobia from a bootable usb stick on a old Supermicro SC-847 4U 36 Bay double sided chassis that is based on a H8DGU-F motherboard with 2x AMD Opteron 6378 16 Core 2.4GHz CPU's and it works fine for a backup to the main storage server. I don't think it supports UEFI and I used one of the rear USB2 ports. It's a power hog but will do for now.

 

[CelticWebs]

Thank you for the help both, @PhilD13, I hadn't even considered the IPMI disk to boot from! that would probably have saved me a fair bit of time.

After writing the USB may times, swapping USB sticks and trying pretty much every way of writing eth image I coud think of, I remember the old days with SDCards that only like being written to very slowly if being used in certain devices, so I cracked out and old USB hub and wrote the USB stick plugged in to that. It took considerably longer but it booted!!!

I then had to edit the install script to enabled it to recognise the SSD after formatting it by inputting a sleep command. I'm up and running!

I've just set the Fixed IP and now I'm in the GUI pondering over the best way to setup a 22 disk raid configuration!

 

[PhilD13]

That's good!