Can't Boot from USB

[GeoffLee]

Hi, I'm totally new to FreeNAS8 - trying it out for the first time and I can't get it to successfully boot from a USB drive.

I'm getting this error message:

Can't work out which disk we are booting from.
Guessed BIOS device 0x80 not found by probes, defaulting to disk0:

can't load 'kernel'

I don't think its a USB problem since I loaded the image through windows using the guide on the forums here, and I also tried installing from a CD onto the USB drive then booting, but I got the same error.

Any help is appreciated!

 

[GeoffLee]

Update - I just resolved the issue. I thought it was something wrong with the mobo because it was old.

Turns out I needed to have BIOS EHCI hand off enabled, took me a while to figure it out, since even with it disabled (default setting) the system would boot from a USB key with Ubuntu on it.

 

[joeschmuck]

Glad you fixed it on your own. This is what we like to see is someone motivated to try and find out the problem and fix it. Too many people run into a problem, stop and ask for help. The don't go the extra mile to figure it out on their own. To be honest, since it was a MB issue and I've never heard of EHCI Hand Off before, I would have never guessed that setting, although I would have said it could have been either a BIOS setting or the USB drive wasn't capable of booting.

If you do run into a tuff time, please describe the problem and your equipment/software your running. We will ask in most cases so we can give the best help possible.

-Mark

 

[GeoffLee]

Thanks Mark!

I've never heard of EHCI Hand Off before either so it threw me off too. And sorry about not filling out system specs, I've got them filled out now, hopefully they're complete enough for you guys to help!

Thanks again!

 

[joeschmuck]

I see you're running 8.0 Release. You should upgrade to Beta-4 or one of the nightly builds as the release is old as dirt and has tons of bugs. Beta-4 has fixed a lot of issues but the nightly builds have made great changes too. You will have to update from the iso image due to a bug between 8.0 and anything after Beta-3. Trust me, you will want to do this update now before you run into other issues.

-Mark

 

[GeoffLee]

Okay, I'll be sure to upgrade to Beta-4 then! Thanks for the heads up Mark!

 

[tktan]

For Dell servers, one thing I've learnt is that we need to set the USB emulation in BIOS from "auto" to "HDD" else it will hang at F1: FreeBSD when trying to boot off the USB flashdrive.