SOLVED FreeNAS USB Boot on GigaByte EP-43 UD3L with F8 bios

[LarryJ]

I installed FreeNAS to my 8 GB USB drive from the FreeNAS 11 iso which I created. The install proceeded without error. But when I removed the CD and plugged theUSB drive into the Gigabyte board and rebooted, bios would hang at the Gigabyte splash screen. Over a day I tried many things. The F8 firmware allows boot from a "USB HDD" and I was certain I had booted many varieties of Linux on that board. Even the Windoze install drive booted normally. But my FreeNAS USB refused.

Finally, I got out my copy of GParted which I always have installed on my Ubuntu Linux machines, and looked at what was on the FreeNAS boot drive. Yes, that USB drive that hangs my PC. The First partition of 512.00 KiB was flagged bios_grub. Clicking Ignore at the "Not all of the space available to /dev/sd*" warning, I changed the flags to read boot,legacy_boot,esp using the GParted command Partition->Manage Flags, and then choosing one by one from the drop down menu. So now reading from the FreeeNAS Web interface Boot reads :
Boot Volume Condition: HEALTHY
Size: 7.4 GiB
Used: 750.3 MiB (9%)

Hope this is useful for someone else.

 

[wisepass]

You my friend are a legend and I only wish I could have found this page sooner. I had the same issues of several different USB sticks (many of which had always worked as a bootable USB media on multiple previous OS's) hanging / hangs at bios start and not booting until they are remove and the system restarted.

I use an old Shuttle SP35P2 using an Intel P35 chip.

Interestingly if I turn off support for legacy devices in the bios the system boots but the drive isn't detected (used USB 2.0 and 3.0 devices)

I used my GParted Live CD to boot then insterted the USB Stick in question once everything had loaded up then followed your instructions above!

Thanks again for posting!