FreeNAS Mini unresponsive

[AMPSandMan]

Hello, first post here, so apologies if I'm a bit of a noob. I have a FreeNAS Mini that I bought about two and a half years ago and am on my third motherboards under warranty. Seeing how I'm a bit past the warranty period, I figured I'd drop a post here to see if, by some chance, there's a relatively inexpensive solution to my problem. I'm not much in the way of a power user, so please bear with me.

Again apologies for being a noob, but I wasn't quite sure how to search the forum first for the problem I'm having. Earlier today, my FreeNAS Mini became unresponsive over my home network, and unavailable through the web interface. I flipped on the display and saw this:

It was unresponsive to the keyboard, so I forced a reboot by holding the power button, waiting for it to power down, waiting for a count of ten, then hitting the power button again. It booted normally, and ran fine for maybe an hour or two before it became unresponsive again. I repeated the above power cycle, exported a debug file, and it became unresponsive again within minutes. I power cycled it again, and got nothing. No display, the hard drives didn't spin up, no network activity lights.

Any advice? Let me know what other information you need. Thanks


Sand

Edit for clarity - I'm on my third motherboard; it has been replaced twice under warranty.

 

[Redcoat]

See this thread. Note that iXsystems has extended the warranty to 3 years on the FreeNAS mini so it sounds as if you are still "in" - see this posting. I suggest you contact them.

 

[SweetAndLow]

Have you tested the ram? Can you get to the bios screen and view the logs for memory errors. There is no way you can have 3 dead motherboard, something else is wrong or environment is wrong or user error.

Sent from my XT1096 using Tapatalk

 

[AMPSandMan]

Have you tested the ram? Can you get to the bios screen and view the logs for memory errors. There is no way you can have 3 dead motherboard, something else is wrong or environment is wrong or user error.

Sent from my XT1096 using Tapatalk

I have not tested my RAM, and I can't get to the BIOS. Right now it appears to be pretty dead to my inexperienced eye.

Just to clarify about the mother boards, as I stated that part poorly, I am on my third motherboard. The first one failed two days before the one year warranty was up, the second failed two weeks later, but within the thirty day warranty for replacement components.

I'd love to know if I'm doing something wrong. Aside from replacing the motherboards and bumping up my RAM, I have not made any hardware changes except to upgrade my hard drives. I treat it no different from any of my other computers, so you might have to tell me the non-obvious things that could kill a FreeNAS Mini unless you want me to make dimensioned drawings of the corner in which I keep the thing and take some climate survey data of my apartment.

Thanks, Redcoat, I'll shoot them an email and see what they say.


Sand

 

[Redcoat]

Do the case and power supply fans spin up when you power on?

 

[SweetAndLow]

Do the case and power supply fans spin up when you power on?

Yeah this is a good question.

What are the temps in the case? Hdd temps, CPU temps, ambient temps.

Sent from my XT1096 using Tapatalk

 

[joeschmuck]

Agreed, you could have a power supply and/or a fan issue. Inspect your hardware carefully, ensure it appears to be working and is clean (no spoon fulls of dust and crap).

A few things to try:
1) Disconnect all your hard drives and USB Flash drives. Basically all you want is the RAM, Video monitor, and Keyboard connected to this decvice.
2) Power on, does it power up and can you get into the BIOS?
3) If it fails, reference the motherboard user manual and remove all the RAM except one stick (assuming you have more than 1 stick). Try to boot again. If that fails, swap out the RAM stick for a different one.
4) If all still fails, do you have a BIOS beep code (you need to have a speaker connected to the SPKR connections if the speaker is not built in. Report the beep code here, and look it up on the internet.
5) So lets say you get this far and all still fails. You have a few options...
a) Replace your power supply if you have a spare laying around.
b) Replace your motherboard.
6) Lets say you do get your system to boot then you will want to bootstrap and test your RAM via Memtest86 (run this for at least a few days), if it passes then run a CPU stress test for about 1 hour, some folks like to run it longer. If both pass then post your results here and we will offer some more advice.

And lastly, did you replace your boot device yet in case it's corrupt and/or failing?