Failed upgrade - wont boot

[TehN00b]

Hello,
I tried to upgrade today from 8.3.0 to 9.1.1, using the web UI method. I'll mention it's been rock solid under 8.3, love it.
Post upgrade the boot does not complete... It shows boot loader, gets to a menu option that allows me to continue boot, escape to a shell, and something else (the screen goes by pretty quickly - i can take a picture if needed) and then the screen goes dark and it beeps three times.
Then nothing.

I removed the USB bootable drive and made a fresh one with 9.1.1. This failed in the same way.
I made a 8.3.2 USB drive, which gets farther - it enumerates out USB controllers and then right after "CPU#2 Launched!" it says ROOT MOUNT ERROR

crap. That doesnt seem right. Anyone have any ideas what I should do, preferably to fix the 9.1.1 install? I could try the fix for the ROOT MOUNT ERROR but I hate to fix an 8.3.2 problem when i really want to get to 9.1.1

The plex plugin.. awesome. Really looking forward to that.

 

[cyberjock]

Can you post your hardware please? Any chance you have a built-in USB3 controller?

 

[TehN00b]

Also, motherboard is MSI A75MA-P35, it's a 64-bit 3-core processor, and I have 8gb ddr3 ram
5-sata disk array with a 6th stand-alone drive

 

[TehN00b]

Yes, built in USB3 controller
http://www.newegg.com/Product/Product.aspx?Item=N82E16813130633

 

[cyberjock]

Yeah, you are likely having the same issues with USB3 that a lot of other people are having. You might want to try disabling XHCI(USB3) in your BIOS if you can. FreeBSD is picky with USB3 controllers. With FreeNAS 8.x USB3 was disabled by default and in FreeNAS 9.x it is enabled by default.

I'd try disabling the USB3 if you can. If you have any USB2 ports on your motherboard you might want to try those. Basically you need to get your boot device off of USB3. Some people have controllers that have drivers that don't work quite right so they had to disable the USB controllers entirely to get FreeNAS to boot at all. Naturally this forces them to use a hard drive to boot FreeNAS off of, which isn't particularly friendly.

If you don't mind, can you try booting the FreeNAS USB from another computer that does boot and add the tunable:

hint.xhci.0.disabled="1"​

Not sure if that will work. Nobody has tested it for me with verified USB3 issues, but I'm hopeful it will work.

 

[TehN00b]

I will try to change it through a second computer although i dont know if i have any without a USB3 controller.
I did, however, boot it to the loader prompt and used the "set" command to add the hint..

set hint.xhci.0.disabled="1"

then booted.
Same problem. Should that have worked? I also re-upgraded it from 8.3.0 USB drive to 9.3 and, prior to the upgrade, add the hint.xhci.0.disabled="1" setting. That did not work, although it could be because the upgrade didnt fully process the 8.3 settings?

 

[cyberjock]

I'm not sure if it "should" have worked. Your issue might have nothing to do with USB3 at all either. It's really tough to say because for those of us it works on, it works. For those of us that it doesn't work, it just doesn't work.

The issue is that USB3 was available but disabled in FreeNAS 8.3+. It could be enabled with a proper tunable. Many people enabled it and most had to re-disable it. I was able to enable it without issues on my Gigabyte 1366 socket board from 2009. Some people had success disabling USB3 in their BIOS or removing the add-on card if possible. There's a lot of conjecture on what is actually broken and it could be multiple issues that cause the same symptoms. It seems if you have hardware that isn't very new it generally works just fine. Newer stuff is a different story though. FreeNAS recently made the move to FreeBSD 9 as a base and Haswell was released about the same time. Many Haswell boards come with USB3 built in, and many desktop boards don't have an option to disable it either.

There's lots of confusion and the only real solid answer is that some people get FreeNAS to work through various ways(like disabling USB3 for many people in the BIOS) but plenty of others end up with no solution.

I was hoping the hint would work for you, but it didn't.

There is one thing that I've noticed though from all of the complaints. Far more AMD users have problems than Intel users. I presume that is because Intel supports their hardware more extensively in pretty much every OS than AMD does. Also the fact that AMD pretty much sells a CPU and leaves everything else up to the motherboard maker while Intel offers the CPU and chipset with many Intel NICs, Intel USB controllers, and Intel accessories able to be built-in very easily. So the Intel hardware is fairly standardized while AMD hardware is whatever the motherboard manufacturer plans to use. This gives far greater diversity in hardware configurations for AMD, but also raises the risk that some poor quality or unsupported hardware is used.

If I were in your shoes an you wanted to continue using your hardware I'd just go to 8.3.2 and upload your config file. As an alternative you could start disabling all the hardware you can in the BIOS and see if that helps. You never know what might be the problem.