SOLVED FreeNAS boot problem

[hasirak]

Hi. I'm having some problems booting and was hoping someone could point me in the right direction.
I installed FreeNAS a week ago and it has been running fine for the last 4 days straight. Today i restarted the server and now FreeNAS will not boot.
Earlier it automatically booted FreeNAS, but now it seems to get stuck on the bootloader.

When i try to boot i get this:

It just keeps adding number signs forever. Pressing F2 adds another number sign, and pressing F1 stops this but doesn't do anything else.

Specs:
I am running FreeNAS-9.2.1.5 on an internal SanDisk Cruzer Fit 4GB memory stick.
Motherboard: ASRock E3C226D2I
CPU: Intel Xeon E3 1230 V3
Memory: Crucial 16GB(2x8), DIMM, DDR3, PC3-12800, 1,35V, Unbuffered, EEC

I have disabled all other boot devices in BIOS other than the memory stick. And SATA mode is set to AHCI.

 

[cyberjock]

If this started with no change from you then your install is most likely corrupt. Your boot device is probably bad. Try a different USB stick and a fresh install of FreeNAS followed by uploading your config file.

 

[hasirak]

Thank you for the quick reply cyberjock, it also seems you hit the nail on the head. I tried testing the USB stick with "check flash", but it wasn't even able to initialize, windows disk management was able to detect it and i could see the partitions, but even after formatting it to fat32 "check flash" wasn't able to work on it.
I reinstalled on a different USB stick and it booted. At the first attempt it got stuck at the very end, something about the ip address already being registered, but another reboot fixed it. It seems to be working now.

A small digression: I'm new to FreeNAS, haven't even set up a zpool yet, and was wondering, if something similar were to happen in the future and i had to reinstall FreeNAS, would it be easy to recreate the zpool? Would i need to have a backup of some sort of config file, or would it be straightforward as long as the disk and sata setup was identical?

 

[danb35]

Keeping a backup of your FreeNAS config file is a good idea, but a fresh installation should recognize any zpools on the machine and be able to import them.

 

[gpsguy]

You might consider creating a cron job to backup your configuration file. Search the forum for an example.