Has my upgrade to 12 failed?

[handsy]

Was on 11.3U5 and changed train to 12.0 to update.
All seemed to be going OK and server rebooted (Supermicro)......but TrueNAS never came up and at the point in my screenshot (attached) it went no further :(
How do I recover this situation?
Thanks

 

[HoneyBadger]

Yes, it's failed. Reboot your machine and choose to manually start a previous boot environment, you should see your 11.3-U5 install there. Boot from that. Since you haven't upgraded your pool, you should just be right back to the pre-update state.

Apparently the UEFI loader in 12.0 isn't compatible with some machines that the 11.3 loader was. I had issues with this an older board. A BIOS/UEFI firmware update fixed it, but if you're already running the latest updates for your board, you may have to back up your config and switch to a BIOS-based boot rather than UEFI to make it work.

 

[handsy]

Yes, it's failed. Reboot your machine and choose to manually start a previous boot environment, you should see your 11.3-U5 install there. Boot from that. Since you haven't upgraded your pool, you should just be right back to the pre-update state.

Apparently the UEFI loader in 12.0 isn't compatible with some machines that the 11.3 loader was. I had issues with this an older board. A BIOS/UEFI firmware update fixed it, but if you're already running the latest updates for your board, you may have to back up your config and switch to a BIOS-based boot rather than UEFI to make it work.

Thank you ......could you please point me in the direction of any guides to backing up config, changing BIOS type and reinstalling *without* losing any of my data?

 

[HoneyBadger]

Start with 2.5.5 "If Something Goes Wrong" in the upgrade section of the docs.

2. Installing and Upgrading — FreeNAS®11.3-U5 User Guide Table of Contents

www.ixsystems.com

This will walk you through rolling back to the previous version. Once there you can use System - General - Save Config to save your copy of the configuration file (although jails/plugins will need to be reconfigured afterwards) - there's other caveats in the preparation section, especially if you have an encrypted pool.

2. Installing and Upgrading — FreeNAS®11.3-U5 User Guide Table of Contents

www.ixsystems.com

Once that's done, the steps to change your boot from UEFI to BIOS are hardware specific, but generally speaking you need to get into your BIOS setup, select the "Boot Options" category, and enable a "Legacy Boot" or "CSM" (Compatibility Support Module) to launch the FreeNAS/TrueNAS installer from the BIOS rather than the UEFI loader.

Do a fresh install onto a new boot drive (keep your old one around as a recovery/failsafe) and then import your config file that you saved previously. With luck, it fires up and everything is as it was before, only on 12.0

But crucially don't upgrade your pool until you are sure that you want to stay there. That's a one-way trip, and if you upgrade to a 12.0-feature-level pool, you cannot revert to 11.3-compatible.

 

[Chris Moore]

reinstalling *without* losing any of my data?

Since the boot environment is on one set of media and the data is on another, you are very unlikely to damage your data as long as you don't accidentally install the OS on a data drive. If you are really worried about it, you can disconnect the data drives while the OS upgrade is happening. After TrueNAS is up and running, you can reconnect the data drives.

 

[handsy]

The problem is that I don't see that screen at boot time, i.e. the FreeNAS boot screen.
I only see the one I attached in my original post....don't seem to be able to get anything else

 

[HoneyBadger]

The problem is that I don't see that screen at boot time, i.e. the FreeNAS boot screen.
I only see the one I attached in my original post....don't seem to be able to get anything else

You should see something similar to this screen if you monitor the display output of your machine during the boot process (although with the new TrueNAS ASCII logo instead) - use "4. Select Boot Environment" and look for your pre-upgrade one.

 

[Chris Moore]

The problem is that I don't see that screen at boot time, i.e. the FreeNAS boot screen.
I only see the one I attached in my original post....don't seem to be able to get anything else

I see, you are not even getting to the boot menu because UEFI is not finding the boot partition. I agree with @HoneyBadger , you probably need a BIOS / UEFI upgrade in your system board.
After that, the system board firmware may find the boot partition, but if it does not, you may need to do a full install to your boot media.
I had to do that one time and the "new install" picked up the old system configuration database and all my settings were brought back without even needing to load the config from backup. It is really just a matter of teaching the system board where to look for the boot data.

 

[handsy]

I've just finished upgrading the BIOS on my Supermicro server and tried booting from my RAID'ed 2x SSD boot drive, then each one of the 2 individually. Still no dice!
Looks like I need to download the ISO and reinstall TrueNAS to my boot drives then

 

[Chris Moore]

RAID'ed 2x SSD boot drive

You are not using hardware RAID are you?

Not sure what model system board you are using... Do you have an option for Legacy / UEFI in the BIOS?

The upgrade from FreeNAS to TrueNAS should have prompted you to save a file to your computer. Do you have that file? Should be called something .tar
That is the backup of the config that the system makes before doing an upgrade. Even if you need to do a clean install, you can load that backup to get your system configuration back. Your data will be safe in your pool as long as you don't write anything to your storage pool disks. The pool can be imported even to a clean install if you need to build your system config manually. I have been through plenty of these myself over the years, even moving a pool from ZFS on Linux to FreeNAS, and the key here is to avoid modification to the storage disks. When you re-import the pool, your data should still be fine.

 

[handsy]

You are not using hardware RAID are you?

No, FreeNAS (if I remember correctly) RAID'ed my 2 SSD boot drives during setup for me a year or so ago.
I've now tried changing BIOS boot mode from 'DUAL' to 'UEFI' - still doesn't work.