Freenas won't boot

[Tp88]

I'm wondering if someone can explain what's going on here. I had my freenas server up and running great, then all of a sudden my hard drive share went offline so I rebooted the server and it would not boot. I get the message in the attached picture and it just sits there and does nothing. I tried a new USB stick with freenas and have the same result. Thanks for any insight you can give me.

 

[JohnDigital]

What machine specs? UEFI bios or no. Try disabling one or the other. Also while in bios I would disable any boot devices not going to be used, audio, serial ports, etc. Also is this a USB flash device in a usb3 port? Can you try the boot in a USB2 port vice versa? Seems ive had similar issues in the past, maybe not specifically with FreeNAS

 

[Samuel Tai]

This has happened to me too many times. Your USB stick is toast. You'll have to reinstall FreeNAS to another boot drive, and then reimport your pool. If you have your config backed up, you can reapply it to the new install to get most of your settings back.

Note, USB sticks are no longer recommended for FreeNAS boot drives, due to their fragility. The current recommendation is a SATA disk-on-module (DOM), if your motherboard has a DOM power connector. I myself, after losing multiple USB sticks, switched over to a M.2 SSD connected via a USB3->SATA adapter, connected to my board's USB3 front panel connector.

 

[JohnDigital]

He said he tried a new USB though with same result. I had a machine with a bios that didn't like flash drives over a certain size too. Could be something like that going on. If the machine boots the installer on a USB but not the OS bad flash drive would also be my first guess.

I do however agree fully you should go to a small SSD/Dom or even a regular spinning drive. USB drives are not for this anymore.

 

[Tp88]

Thank you for the suggestions. I ended up trying the USB stick in another port. It was in a USB3 port, and i switched to USB2 and then it worked. Eventually i will switch to a hard drive if the USB sticks aren't reliable.

 

[JohnDigital]

Glad it was so easy. Yeah I've had this happen on alot of 1st Gen USB3 machines. I notice it alot when booting to Linux from a E2Boot flash drive. Linux won't boot on certain machines out of the USB3 port for some reason. Others boot fine.