Failure to boot any version of 9.3 (Install or Upgrade)

[Aliethel]

Hi all!

I've looked around and seen a bunch of posts on this topic, but I haven't found a thread that addresses the problems I've run in to.

Hardware:
Motherboard: ASUS AM1I-A
CPU: AMD Athlon 5350

Scenario:
I've been running FreeNAS 9.2.x for a while now on my hardware, and I haven't had any problems. A couple of days ago I attempted to upgrade to 9.3 and my server went offline. I didn't think much about it until yesterday, and then I jumped in and I've been trying to make things work.

I've tried the upgrade, and then fresh installs on the original USB key, as well as two others, and a USB HDD I had around. I have upgraded the BIOS to the latest, and I'm trying to boot it up with all the other drives stripped to minimize possible cross problems, but still no success.

What happens is I install from the optical drive, to any device, and it returns a success. On reboot, the cursor blinks a couple of times, then the screen goes blank, and the defaults back to the BIOS. I strongly suspect that it has to do with the GPT format, and/or secure boot (which I've attempted to turn to "other OS").

Does anyone have any advice on how to make one of the various USB keys/options work? Anyone have experience with setting up using this Motherboard?

P.S. I've been trying a bunch of different settings/combinations on the motherboard, but I haven't gotten one to work in about 10 hours.

 

[dlavigne]

Does the BIOS have an option that sounds like it will either boot "EFI with BIOS emulation" or boot using "legacy BIOS mode"?

 

[cyberjock]

Last I heard there's a bunch of AMD CPUs/motherboards that won't work with FreeNAS 9.3. The fix is to get better hardware (aka Intel). I don't know if you fall into that category or not as I read a post and as soon as I read "AMD" I stop reading because I don't think AMD is "appropriate" for FreeNAS (not to mention I don't track AMD hardware and such so it's all meaningless to me).

 

[Aliethel]

Does the BIOS have an option that sounds like it will either boot "EFI with BIOS emulation" or boot using "legacy BIOS mode"?

There is a section in the "boot options" area where there is the option to have either a native UEFI boot, or "legacy". When I attempt to set it to the UEFI only (or even as the first option), then I get an error on boot that there are no compatible devices found. Is there something custom about the partitioning or the bootloader, other than the GPT?

 

[Aliethel]

Last I heard there's a bunch of AMD CPUs/motherboards that won't work with FreeNAS 9.3. The fix is to get better hardware (aka Intel). I don't know if you fall into that category or not as I read a post and as soon as I read "AMD" I stop reading because I don't think AMD is "appropriate" for FreeNAS (not to mention I don't track AMD hardware and such so it's all meaningless to me).

I've seen you post quite a bit, and I have to thank you for reminding me why I don't normally interact directly with forums like this as a first option when I run into a problem. "Get better hardware" is not an excuse for poor development, poor documentation, or poor support skills.

Jumping in and telling us all that you stopped reading as soon as you saw "AMD" (on the 5th line of the post) means that you spent more time deriding me and belittling my choice of hardware than you did actually reading the post. I do like how you have "Only you can prevent flame wars" in your signature, as it's quite ironic that I'm betting you're often the cause of, or fanning, the flames.

 

[cyberjock]

I've seen you post quite a bit, and I have to thank you for reminding me why I don't normally interact directly with forums like this as a first option when I run into a problem. "Get better hardware" is not an excuse for poor development, poor documentation, or poor support skills.

Jumping in and telling us all that you stopped reading as soon as you saw "AMD" (on the 5th line of the post) means that you spent more time deriding me and belittling my choice of hardware than you did actually reading the post. I do like how you have "Only you can prevent flame wars" in your signature, as it's quite ironic that I'm betting you're often the cause of, or fanning, the flames.

Well, good luck. If you spent any time here even the CTO of iX has said that AMD is basically unsupported in the entire FreeBSD community and therefore isn't a recommended choice. But feel free to take my comment personally. Doesn't change the facts of the situation at all...

If you read around here at all you'd know that the community (not just me) have this attitude with AMD and Realtek NICs. Mention Realtek in a post titled "slow network performance" and nobody will even read it. They'll tell you to get a real bonafide NIC (and usually that means Intel) and then come back if its slow. We KNOW, from years of experience, what works and what doesn't. Not our fault if someone wants to do everything we recommend against. Just don't be surprised when we recommend it to you yet again.

 

[Aliethel]

We'll chalk this up to "you don't know, and can't think of a reason why".

Can anyone else come up with a reason why the ASUS BIOS (nothing to do with the processor) seems to not understand the GPT formatted thumbdrive?

 

[Waco]

I'm guessing there's no option to disable secure boot in its entirety? You could try rolling back to an older BIOS but as an intermediate fix you could try booting directly from a SATA drive.

 

[Aliethel]

There is an option to set the Secure Boot options to "Other OS", which supposedly ignores Secure Boot. I've tried that, along with forcing the legacy BIOS boot options to no avail. I've also tried installing on a SATA drive, and that won't boot, either. It looks like it is not even getting to the bootloader portion of code.

I did burn a new DVD, with a different drive, and tried loading it up on my desktop (which also has an ASUS motherboard), and I was able to boot into 9.3 on a thumbdrive without having to change any of the BIOS settings.

I reinstalled 9.2.1.9 on another stick and have no trouble booting into that and running things.

 

[Waco]

I'm in the process of upgrading to 9.3 myself. My USB stick wouldn't boot on 9.3 either, so I'm adding a video card back into the system to see what's up (it's normally headless).

My setup is Intel CPU and Intel NIC, so at least I won't be berated if I run into any odd issues. :/

 

[Aliethel]

Good luck!

It seems like there are some significant problems all through the forum with the upgrade. Are you going to clone your setup and then upgrade the clone so you can back out easily?

 

[Waco]

That's what I did. Cloned the config onto a new USB drive, booted it (all was well), then performed the GUI upgrade. That failed catastrophically, so I ended up doing a fresh install and that seems to have taken without issue.

Did you try the newest BIOS available on your board?

 

[Aliethel]

That was the first troubleshooting step that I tried after reading around the forums a bit.

When I have some more time, I'm thinking about building a FreeBSD thumbdrive to play around with. Right now I'm resilvering a failed drive (odd, eh?), so I don't want to endlessly reboot.

 

[Waco]

Ah, sorry I missed that in the OP.

 

[Whattteva]

That's what I did. Cloned the config onto a new USB drive, booted it (all was well), then performed the GUI upgrade. That failed catastrophically, so I ended up doing a fresh install and that seems to have taken without issue.

Did you try the newest BIOS available on your board?

I also met disastrous results upgrading from 9.2.1.7 to 9.3-STABLE through the GUI.
I then realized a huge change from 9.2 to 9.3 is the fact that they no longer have an image that you can just dd straight to a drive and boot from it.
The image you download is now an installer that you have to install to another drive. This created a big headache for me as I only had one thumb drive.

Anyways, I managed to borrow another drive from someone and performed the installation and everything went fine from there, but it sure would be nice if we still can get an image that could just be burned straight to a drive and boot from instead of going through the installation procedure.

 

[Dano]

I have the same motherboard and CPU and have been having similar problems. I have installed the image on a USB drive and used the image to boot an HP laptop... all works fine. I'm unsure what the problem is but am about ready to ditch the motherboard and try a non Asus one!

 

[JayG30]

I also met disastrous results upgrading from 9.2.1.7 to 9.3-STABLE through the GUI.
I then realized a huge change from 9.2 to 9.3 is the fact that they no longer have an image that you can just dd straight to a drive and boot from it.
The image you download is now an installer that you have to install to another drive. This created a big headache for me as I only had one thumb drive.

Anyways, I managed to borrow another drive from someone and performed the installation and everything went fine from there, but it sure would be nice if we still can get an image that could just be burned straight to a drive and boot from instead of going through the installation procedure.

So much this! Very annoying.

Also, I'm experiencing issues with 9.3 and an Asrock mITX board (Intel hardware). Was working fine on 9.2.1.7 and a very old Lexar 4GB drive. Submitted some info to a bug because thought it was the new sandisk fit 32GB usb drives I am trying to setup as a mirror. Had to get new thumb drives because of the increase from 4->8GB recommendation and these were cheap enough and figure why not get 32GB. However I brought them home and it booted no problem on 2 run of the mile home PC's. Very strange. I've ran everything up to 9.3 from the Lexar on the box. The sandisk does work with 9.3 but not when combined with the Asrock board. I read somewhere that some people using freebsd from USB had issues with it not giving enough time for USB devices to be recognized and they had to increase that time? Just a thought.