FreeNAS Won't Boot On USB Stick

[Telephonewire]

Hello,

I am a newbie and am trying to get FreeNAS up and running on a HP DC7900 with an Intel E8400 CPU.
It 'only' has 4GB of ram (at the moment) and I know 8GB is recommended but I thought it should at least load the program with 4GB's of ram.

I managed to generate a bootable USB memory stick with the installer image on it using Win32 Disk Imager.
The PC boots and installs FreeNAS on to a separate 8GB USB HP memory stick without issue and says it was successful.

It then says remove the CD Rom and re-boot the system.
The system then shuts down, I pull out the bootable USB memory stick (leaving the 8GB USB HP memory stick in the PC) and the system restarts but it only gets as far as a blinking cursor in the top left of the screen!

I tried repeating the process and booted from the bootable memory stick again. This time it said do you want to upgrade or do a fresh install (so it recognises that the 8GB USB HP memory stick already has FreeNAS installed on it) so I tried selecting 'upgrade'. It goes through the installation process again and again it says the installation was successful.

It then says remove the CD Rom and re-boot the system.
The system then shuts down, I pull out the bootable USB memory stick and the system restarts. This time it then goes through a process of reformatting the configuration data to bring it up to date for the current release.

Once the configuration data has been updated it then shuts down and re-boots again and as before only gets to a blinking cursor in the top left of the screen!

My system can obvious boot from a USB stick and it appears to be installing FreeNAS onto the 8GB memory stick okay but then it simply won't boot beyond the blinking cursor in the top left of the screen.

What am I doing wrong or what do I need to do to fix - any suggestions gratefully received.

I have spent many hours on this now over several days and am close to giving up and look at NAS4Free!

Many thanks in anticipation.

 

[Ericloewe]

Stuff that old tends to have trouble booting from GPT/UEFI.

Try the latest BIOS version, if applicable. If that doesn't work, you're pretty much out of options with that hardware.

 

[SweetAndLow]

Your bios doesn't see anything to boot off of. Make sure your boot order is correct and if that doesn't work it might be the gpt issue.

 

[cyberjock]

It 'only' has 4GB of ram (at the moment) and I know 8GB is recommended but I thought it should at least load the program with 4GB's of ram.

No, wrong. 8G isn't "recommended". 8GB is the minimum. Big difference. We know FreeNAS doesn't work right without 8GB, MINIMUM!

So please don't expect FreeNAS to work without 8GB, MINIMUM. There's a reason we say 8G minimum and not 8GB recommended.

Nobody is going to bother helping you with problems that are very possibly self inflicted because you couldn't go with a mininum. A minimum we've determined is the minimum to establish proper operation of FreeNAS.

 

[Telephonewire]

No, wrong. 8G isn't "recommended". 8GB is the minimum. Big difference. We know FreeNAS doesn't work right without 8GB, MINIMUM!

So please don't expect FreeNAS to work without 8GB, MINIMUM. There's a reason we say 8G minimum and not 8GB recommended.

Nobody is going to bother helping you with problems that are very possibly self inflicted because you couldn't go with a mininum. A minimum we've determined is the minimum to establish proper operation of FreeNAS.

I would agree with you if the system had booted or part booted and then run into difficulties due to lack of ram but this is not the case.
The system has not even attempted to load a single byte of the OS so there is no way it can know at that stage there is insufficient ram available to complete a successful load of the OS.

 

[Telephonewire]

Stuff that old tends to have trouble booting from GPT/UEFI.

Try the latest BIOS version, if applicable. If that doesn't work, you're pretty much out of options with that hardware.

Okay many thanks. I will check out the HP website to see if there are any later BIOS updates for this hardware.

Please can you expand a little on the GPT/UEFI issue?

 

[Telephonewire]

Stuff that old tends to have trouble booting from GPT/UEFI.

Try the latest BIOS version, if applicable. If that doesn't work, you're pretty much out of options with that hardware.

I guess it would be fine to boot from a real hard drive? Since I have 4 SATA connectors and only want to use 3 discs this may be an option apart from being able to physically fitting all the drives in the case!

 

[Ericloewe]

That sometimes helps, too.

 

[gpsguy]

Do a forum search for "DC7900". There have been other message threads about this system. As cyberjock implied, running with less than 8GB of RAM may lead to problems.

I remember the number, since many years ago we had DC 7700's at my workplace.

 

[Telephonewire]

Stuff that old tends to have trouble booting from GPT/UEFI.

Try the latest BIOS version, if applicable. If that doesn't work, you're pretty much out of options with that hardware.

Hi - many thanks for your advice!!

I updated the BIOS from v1.22 (Sep 2009) to the latest BIOS v1.26 (Apr 2011) and away she went....!!

All loads and up and running without issue. I can log on to the GUI via a web browser and configure etc.

Only trouble is now - despite several attempt and reading the manuals / help files and trying a 'Wizard' set up I can't access the share via other Windows PC's on the network!!

I can see the 'FREENAS' as a computer on the network using Windows Explorer bur double clicking on it or typing '\\192.168.1.203' just gives an error message effectively saying no permissions!!

If you know what noobies typically do wrong and why they might not be able to see a share I would welcome any comments.

 

[Ericloewe]

Have you followed the manual's quick start guide?

 

[cyberjock]

I would agree with you if the system had booted or part booted and then run into difficulties due to lack of ram but this is not the case.
The system has not even attempted to load a single byte of the OS so there is no way it can know at that stage there is insufficient ram available to complete a successful load of the OS.

So you are sure the installation scripts didn't get all fubared and terminate in some broken way? See, things quickly derp badly and you sometimes get no warning because the script terminated in a totally unexpected way. I saw this when I accidentally created a FreeBSD VM on VMWare Workstation (the default is 1GB of RAM on my version) and it installed, but wasn't bootable 3 times in a row. After the 3rd time I was convinced that the ISO was bad, then I thought the installer was borked. Turned out it was the RAM choice. Whoops!