SOLVED FreeNAS fails to boot after hardware change

[oxyris]

My good old Asus E35M1-I (https://www.asus.com/Motherboards/E35M1I/) recently died along with my PSU, probably due to a power surge.

My drives seem to have survived though (at least they are were still detected in BIOS when I connected them to a different (functioning) mainboard). I now bought some new hardware to get my NAS back up and running.

• CPU: Intel Pentium G4400
• Mainboard: Gigabyte GA-H170M-D3H
• RAM: 2x8GB Kingston HyperX DDR4-2133
• Harddisks (as before): 6x WD20EARS/X 2TB

I'm not completely sure on what version of FreeNAS I'm running. When starting to boot, it says something along the lines of "FreeBSD 8.2-RELEASE-p9" so I assume I was running FreeNAS 8.2?
The FreeNAS installation is on a USB2 stick (Kingston DataTraveler 100 G2 8GB).

However, I'm unable to boot into FreeNAS with the new hardware. After selecting "Boot FreeNAS" in the boot menu



the process eventually fails with a "ROOT MOUNT ERROR":



I've tried doing some research regarding the error above and found some posts on this forum that mentioned that FreeNAS did not support USB3 out-of-the-box (e.g. https://forums.freenas.org/index.php?threads/usb-3-0-part-ii.4278/#post16336)
This seemed a likely explanation as my new mainboard only provides USB3 ports. Unfortunately, there seems to be no BIOS option to somehow switch the USB3 ports to USB2 (also performed a BIOS update to be sure).
The posts mentioned that USB3 could be explicitly enabled by adding a "tunable" with "xhci_load=YES".
So after rebooting and selecting "Escape to loader prompt" from the boot menu I used the command "set xhci_load=YES" followed by "boot" to attempt to enable USB3 support. However, the same "ROOT MOUNT ERROR" as before occurred.

After this, I got the latest stable FreeNAS version (9.10.2) and put in onto a new SanDisk 16GB USB3 stick. I started the "Installation/upgrade" process but it seems like my installation is not properly detected.



After I select all my disks the warning shown above appears, indicating that a fresh install would be performed.

So my questions are the following

• Are there any other approaches to get my original FreeNAS installation running? Is it even possible to get FreeNAS 8.2 running on a USB3 port? Or might there be some other problem causing the "ROOT MOUNT ERROR"?
• Any idea why the new FreeNAS version does not detect my old installation?

Thanks.

 

[wblock]

In FreeNAS, the operating system is kept separate from the data drives. Do not install the operating system onto any of your existing data drives. That would be bad.

Instead, get another (yes, another) USB stick. Turn off the power and disconnect all your data drives just to be safe.

Connect the two USB sticks, the installer and the destination USB stick. Boot the installer and install to the destination stick. Remove the installer. Reboot from the FreeNAS stick. Verify that it boots. Shut down power again, then you can connect the data disks. Then see http://doc.freenas.org/9.10/storage.html#import-volume.

 

[oxyris]

Thanks for your reply and sorry for not properly reading the documentation! I missed that the USB drive containing the ISO was actually required to install FreeNAS - I just assumed that the USB stick contained a bootable FreeNAS after flashing the ISO to it.

So I prepared the USB drive using an additional USB drive as you described.

However, if I now boot from the 9.10.2 installation drive, it gets stuck at "Loading kernel modules"



I've tried messing around with the BIOS settings (i.e. force as hard disk) as described in the "Troubleshooting" section at https://doc.freenas.org/9.3/freenas_install.html, but no no avail.

According to some other posts, there seem so be some issues with 9.10.2?

https://forums.freenas.org/index.php?threads/upgrade-from-9-10-to-9-10-2-freezes-on-boot.48794/
https://forums.freenas.org/index.php?threads/9-10-2-cant-boot-after-new-installation.48915/

 

[dlavigne]

Does it hang there forever? Up to that point it looks good as it finds and imports your volume. What happens if you ctrl c when it hangs or does it freeze altogether?

 

[oxyris]

I left if running for around 30 minutes and nothing else happened.

When I Ctrl-C the system shuts down/restarts. I don't remember what the output said but I will post a screenshot when I get home.

 

[SweetAndLow]

It might be a good idea to use the original version of FreeNAS you had installed in the first place. Doing an upgrade and trouble shooting hardware problems at the same time is a bad idea.

Sent from my Nexus 5X using Tapatalk

 

[oxyris]

I left if running for around 30 minutes and nothing else happened.

When I Ctrl-C the system shuts down/restarts. I don't remember what the output said but I will post a screenshot when I get home.

I tried out using Ctrl-C when the system hangs in "Loading kernel modules" and it actually continued. I guess I didn't actually use Ctrl-C yesterday, but Ctrl-Alt-Del which caused the system go shutdown instead of continuing.

So after using Ctrl-C I get a bunch of "ACPI Error" messages as

Code:

ACPI Error: Could not acquire AML Interpreter mutex [...]
ACPI Error: Mutex [0x0] is not acquired, cannot release [...]
ACPI Exception: AE_ERROR, Thread 100631 could not acquire Mutex [...]

But eventually get to the next point where the systems hangs



Now I can Ctrl-C again which eventually brings me to the "Console setup" menu.



Now I'm not sure if "No configured interfaces were found. Try to do it manually." indicates an error or not. I'm able to see that my FreeNAS box is connected to the network (logged in to my router to confirm). Also the ifconfig output indicates my Ethernet connection is active. However, when I try accessing via the web GUI, I get the following output in my browser

An error occurred.
Sorry, the page you are looking for is currently unavailable.
Please try again later.

If you are the system administrator of this resource then you should check the error log for details.

Faithfully yours, nginx.

Some dmesg output (not complete)



Can anyone shed some light on to what's going on? I'm in the process of googling through the various error messages but maybe somebody can already see what the problem might be.

It might be a good idea to use the original version of FreeNAS you had installed in the first place. Doing an upgrade and trouble shooting hardware problems at the same time is a bad idea.

Sent from my Nexus 5X using Tapatalk

Yeah this would be my preferred solution as well. However, I was not able to get FreeNAS to boot from my old installation (see my original post). Maybe you've got some suggestions on what could be done there?

 

[gpsguy]

When SweetAndLow said "It might be a good idea to use the original version of FreeNAS you had installed in the first place.", he meant, installing the old version of FreeNAS on a new flash drive.

You can download older versions of FreeNAS all the way back to 8.2.0 from: http://download.freenas.org/

Yeah this would be my preferred solution as well. However, I was not able to get FreeNAS to boot from my old installation (see my original post). Maybe you've got some suggestions on what could be done there?

 

[wblock]

ACPI problems would make me look for a BIOS or UEFI update.

 

[oxyris]

When SweetAndLow said "It might be a good idea to use the original version of FreeNAS you had installed in the first place.", he meant, installing the old version of FreeNAS on a new flash drive.

You can download older versions of FreeNAS all the way back to 8.2.0 from: http://download.freenas.org/

I ended up trying this too, but it led to the same "ROOT MOUNT ERROR" as observed with the original USB stick.

I eventually gave 9.10.1 U4 a try because someone mentioned that they had more success with that version (see https://forums.freenas.org/index.php?threads/trouble-booting.49324/).
To my surprise I was able to boot from 9.10.1 U4 without any issues at all and could immediately access the web GUI and successfully import my old volume. I'm doing a backup now.

Thanks for your help.

 

[Apollo]

@oxyris,
Reading quickly though the thread and the first scary thing I noticed is that you selected all your 2TB drive for FreeNAS install. Did I get this wrong? If that's the case do you still have your data accessible from those 2TB drives? I guess not.

 

[diedrichg]

@oxyris,
Reading quickly though the thread and the first scary thing I noticed is that you selected all your 2TB drive for Freenas install. Did I get this wrong? If that's the case do you still have your data accessible from those 2TB drives? I guess not.

Oh, crap! In the last image it looks like they DID do just that.

 

[oxyris]

@oxyris,
Reading quickly though the thread and the first scary thing I noticed is that you selected all your 2TB drive for FreeNAS install. Did I get this wrong? If that's the case do you still have your data accessible from those 2TB drives? I guess not.

No I did not actually do this. I was confused with the installation. I missed that the initial ISO is only to install FreeNAS (I thought I could boot from the USB stick which I had dd'ed the ISO to directly). The message "this will erase all partitions..." eventually scared me off ;)

 

[Apollo]

The message "this will erase all partitions..." eventually scared me off ;)

You would have destroyed your entire pool.
And yes, you should be scared off.