FreeNAS 11 shutdown problem

[dominator99]

Hi All
Had a weird problem last night when I shutdown FreeNAS. It appeared to proceed as normal (red warning screen) but I noticed the power LED stayed ON so I left it; ten minutes later the power LED was still ON so I forced a shutdown with the power button.
On reboot I couldn't connect via my network to FreeNAS.
I connected a monitor to FreeNAS to follow the boot procedure & after the initial BIOS routines completed I was left with a blank screen & flashing cursor & no further progress.
I entered the BIOS & noticed the boot order had changed; I normally boot from 2 mirrored Sandisk Cruzer Blade 16GB USB sticks in UEFI (1st & 2nd boot order option) but the first boot option had changed to legacy BIOS boot of the same single USB stick; the original boot order in UEFI had been moved to the 2nd & 3rd boot order option. Resetting the boot order to original setting allowed FreeNAS to boot as normal. All other detected SATA/USB devices had been disabled in the BIOS prior to this problem occurring.
Any ideas as to how the BIOS settings could be changed (the motherboard is only a month old)

 

[Chris Moore]

I have the same board in my system (Supermicro X9SCM-F) and even though you have only had it for a month, it is an older design and the UEFI is perhaps not as perfect as in more modern boards. I would guess that it just flipped out for a moment. It sometimes happens. You could try putting a fresh BIOS battery on the board to ensure it has enough standby voltage to retain settings. The boot order changing can happen when the system thinks it has found new hardware. I have had it happen when I plugged a new drive into one of the on-board SATA ports. As long as the error is not happening often, I wouldn't worry about it.

 

[dominator99]

Thanks for your input Chris.

I can't see how the problem of not shutting down cleanly can be related to the boot problem but me forcing a shutdown followed by a reboot could be caused as you suggested.

"The boot order changing can happen when the system thinks it has found new hardware" - the system didn't exactly find new hardware but found the legacy version of the same hardware which had previously been disabled. More a case of re-enabling hardware that had been disabled. All 8 of the SATA HDD's listed in the BIOS remained disabled; seems odd that it should choose to re-enable just one piece of hardware?
Not sure whether an UEFI or legacy BIOS issue; I'll check to see if a BIOS update is available

Just updated IPMI firmware from 3.38 to 3.52 & will monitor. Also changed the BIOS boot option from 'UEFI and legacy' to 'UEFI only' but not sure if that would prevent Freenas booting due to 'phantom' hardware device detection as before