How to make a BIOS bootable installer USB flash drive?

[truenasfan]

Running a few Dell R710 systems that have issues with UEFI booting in some linux scenarios. For example, with Unraid it's necessary to use BIOS boot instead of UEFI. It seems I may be hitting the same issue with TrueNAS SCALE.

Could you please advise as to how to make a BIOS bootable version of the TrueNAS SCALE installer?

 

[truenasfan]

I wanted to update my findings and efforts on this situation in trying to make this work:

First, I have used Rufus 3.14 to write the most recent ISO (TrueNAS-SCALE-21.06-BETA.1.iso) to USB both with MBR and GPT.

When I boot to a GPT USB 2 flash drive into the R710 with UEFI boot mode enabled with TrueNAS SCALE on it I get GRUB errors:

When I boot to an MBR USB 2 flash drive into BIOS boot mode enabled with TrueNAS SCALE on it, it starts up and the installation proceeds and I can install it to a drive installed on the system...

What I find particularly strange is that the system will NOT boot with BIOS boot mode still enabled after the installation completes. I then changed the system to UEFI boot mode again and tried to start the system. When I got to the UEFI boot selector the TrueNAS SCALE installation on the SSD on embedded SATA port A shows up... AND BOOTS.

This is very strange behavior and we need to isolate what is going on here. I think we need to come up with some more clear instructions and expectations since something is really screwy here.

 

[DaSnipe]

I wanted to update my findings and efforts on this situation in trying to make this work:

First, I have used Rufus 3.14 to write the most recent ISO (TrueNAS-SCALE-21.06-BETA.1.iso) to USB both with MBR and GPT.

When I boot to a GPT USB 2 flash drive into the R710 with UEFI boot mode enabled with TrueNAS SCALE on it I get GRUB errors:

When I boot to an MBR USB 2 flash drive into BIOS boot mode enabled with TrueNAS SCALE on it, it starts up and the installation proceeds and I can install it to a drive installed on the system...

What I find particularly strange is that the system will NOT boot with BIOS boot mode still enabled after the installation completes. I then changed the system to UEFI boot mode again and tried to start the system. When I got to the UEFI boot selector the TrueNAS SCALE installation on the SSD on embedded SATA port A shows up... AND BOOTS.

This is very strange behavior and we need to isolate what is going on here. I think we need to come up with some more clear instructions and expectations since something is really screwy here.

Might be worth submitting a bug report if you can reproduce it. Mine worked fine using UEFI from USB stick created same way (Rufus 3.14 to GPT formatted USB drive). I didn't bother testing MBR since I got UEFI to work

 

[truenasfan]

I found a workaround: https://github.com/ventoy/Ventoy

This seems to be a very nice tool for keeping a USB flash drive bootable and then just popping any ISO onto it for booting.

This seems to reliably work with TrueNAS SCALE and even others after testing such as Proxmox 7 which exhibited the same error. I suspect there is some kind of a GRUB bug that affects both Linux distributions since they are both based on Debian 11.

Definitely a mutual bug.

 

[ADak732]

I ran into the same issue with Rufus and then tried Balena Etcher (https://etcher.balena.io) and it worked fine creating the TrueNas Scale installer from the ISO with my USB drive.

 

[osrk]

I ran into the same issue with Rufus and then tried Balena Etcher (https://etcher.balena.io) and it worked fine creating the TrueNas Scale installer from the ISO with my USB drive.

Had the same issue with rufus. Use dd image writer instead of the default. Using the default results in this error, DD writing (whatever) allows it to boot fine.