First thank you to all the contributors here. I know you do not get paid to develop or support the software and you have my utmost respect and gratitude. This has been beaten to death already but once again there are issues with Dell servers booting FreeNAS to a USB stick. I wanted to create some awareness of the issues for your readers and ask for some assistance.
Also, I need to mention that we were able to get Ubuntu to boot from the USB stick no problems at all..
Some background: We previously used Dell R310's for our FreeNAS systems. There have been no issues booting to USB sticks. The only caveat is that in the BIOS we must select USB Emulation to be set to hard drive for a successful boot. The issue with the newer R520's is that there is no option in its BIOS to do this. So, now the installation seems to go fine however we are stuck at the "Boot: F1" screen and FreeNAS stops there. It seems evident that Dell has no plans to address this, so I was hoping someone here may have had a similar experience with an R520 server and had found a way to overcome this.
I hate to give up one of the hot plug slots to install the FreeNAS system, but alas if that is the only option I will have to do it. Does anyone have any thoughts or suggestions? Again, if no solution is likely, I would advise your readers to avoid buying the Dell R520 servers if they plan on booting FreeNAS from a USB stick.
Thank you all
D Pynn
- My server is a Dell R520 (Xeon 6 core CPU and 16GB RAM)
- BIOS rev 1.4.6
- FreeNAS versions tried from 8.02 to 8.3.2.alpha r13 (all 64Bit) Used install from DVD and tried extracting image using the Win32 Diskmanager tool
- Multiple USB sticks tried 8GB
- Used both the internal USB slot and external slots
- Serial number of server: 8PB78X1
Also, I need to mention that we were able to get Ubuntu to boot from the USB stick no problems at all..
Some background: We previously used Dell R310's for our FreeNAS systems. There have been no issues booting to USB sticks. The only caveat is that in the BIOS we must select USB Emulation to be set to hard drive for a successful boot. The issue with the newer R520's is that there is no option in its BIOS to do this. So, now the installation seems to go fine however we are stuck at the "Boot: F1" screen and FreeNAS stops there. It seems evident that Dell has no plans to address this, so I was hoping someone here may have had a similar experience with an R520 server and had found a way to overcome this.
I hate to give up one of the hot plug slots to install the FreeNAS system, but alas if that is the only option I will have to do it. Does anyone have any thoughts or suggestions? Again, if no solution is likely, I would advise your readers to avoid buying the Dell R520 servers if they plan on booting FreeNAS from a USB stick.
Thank you all
D Pynn