Failed USB Boot Drive

[Eric Dunn]

I have a NAS box running FreeNAS that's been chugging away for about (or at least) 10 years, possibly longer - I'm pretty sure I upgraded the hardware to it's current configuration around 2012. The current hardware configuration is: a (beautiful) Black Antec Sonata Plus 550 Quiet Midi-Tower Case, Gigabyte GA-EP45-DS4P Motherboard, 8 GB RAM, Intel CPU, 4 x 3TB WD (Red) NAS Drives booting off a USB that sticks out the front. I've moved house 5 times, replaced some failed fans and the power supply (once) over the years, but pretty much done nothing but vacuum out the dust from the vents roughly every 12 months. (if it aint broke...) I think I upgraded from 7.? to 8.? (I think 8.6) at some point but didnt go to 10 when it came out as I think the hardware didn't match (once again, if it aint broke...) and the config file is backed up weekly (I know, overkill) to itself.
There is stacks of space on the drives which hold mainly TV shows and Movies which I dont care about, but there is a lot of photos and documents that I do not want to lose.

So now it's broke, and I think it may be just the USB boot drive.

This week I powered it down (gracefully) and removed the USB boot drive from the front so I can open the box and vacuum out the dust. I put it back together and now I get an error that there is no operating system: the disks are storage drives.

I don't know how to test the USB to see if it's faulty and I'm thinking the quickest and easiest is to just create a new USB boot drive via an upgrade install to V9.something (open to suggestions as to which version), however I'm stuck on the first step...

I work on a Windows 10 PC.

I downloaded the ISO of version 9.2.1.9 and when I try to create the USB bootable image from the .iso file I get an error that it is not a bootable .iso. I have tried with other V9 .isos and with Windows USB/DVD Download Tool, Rufus and imagewriter to no avail.

Any help would be greatly appreciated.

Eric

 

[Chris Moore]

Only four drives at 3TB each? Do you recall what the pool configuration is?

Are the utilities not making the USB boot media because they say that the ISO is not bootable or does the media get created and then it won't work for booting FreeNAS?

 

[Eric Dunn]

the first one - the utilities are saying the ISO is not bootable. I have attached the error from Rufus

 

[Redcoat]

I saw that recently a couple of times with 11.2 RU1 and Rufus - Etcher worked just fine.

EDIT - Sorry, did not notice you were working with 9.2.1.9 - my comment likely not relevant.

 

[Chris Moore]

I downloaded the ISO of version 9.2.1.9 and when I try to create the USB bootable image from the .iso file I get an error that it is not a bootable .iso.

Is there a reason you picked that version? It is kind of an odd number. The instructions from back then, if you wanted to make a bootable USB stick, were not to download the ISO file. The ISO would work fine for burning an actual disk, but you couldn't make a USB stick from it. If you wanted to make a bootable USB, you needed to download the version of the file that ended in .img.xz and use a combination of 7-zip and Win32 Disk Imager to install the resulting .img file on a USB stick.

Why are you going with that version?

 

[Chris Moore]

The instructions (best I can find) are in this PDF on page 39:
https://www.ixsystems.com/documentation/freenas/9.2.0/freenas9.2.0_guide.pdf

 

[Eric Dunn]

no real reason, it's the last one before 9.3...