Freenas skips boot menu, but inconsistently

[manofsticks]

Hardware
Motherboard: Intel DH61AG
CPU: Intel(R) Core(TM) i5-3470T CPU @ 2.90GHz (4 cores)
Ram: 16gb
Hard Drives: M.2 SSD 600 256gb (install drive)
2x 4tb WD Red (unconfigured as of now)

Problem
When I boot my server, roughly 80% of the time, Freenas will simply bypass the boot menu instantly and go to a black screen regardless of my loader.conf settings, but otherwise boots fine (as far as I can tell).

The other 20% of the time it behaves as I would expect (following my loader.conf settings).

This problem starts immediately upon a fresh install (I've tried re-installing 3X times). I attributed it to being a default in my loader.conf at first, until I modified it, and started noticing the inconsistency.

The OS is fully updated to the most recent stable build, and I have made no configuration changes beyond the loader.conf.

Documentation
Youtube vid showing the problem here: https://youtu.be/Y462xnEwbek (sorry for quality, phone camera is garbage)

Photo of my loader.conf attached (specifically notice the autoboot delay to 15 seconds, and verbose mode being on; both of which are ignored)


Thank you for help!

 

[dlavigne]

Were you able to determine the root cause for this? If not, is the BIOS at the latest version? Any unneeded devices in the boot order section of the BIOS?

 

[manofsticks]

Sorry for very delayed response.

I ended up abandoning the project, and had not discovered the root cause.

This actually got passed the bios, booting to the freenas loader successfully; aka it successfully loads the drive that freenas is installed to. It was the loader.conf boot menu that got skipped. (maybe extra clarity, if this were Linux I would say "it skips over the grub menu", although I know it's not grub here; just my knowledge of the BSD world is limited and not sure how better to describe it).