HP DL180 G6 USB boot woes (solved but confused)

[willglynn]

This likely goes without saying, but – this is my first FreeNAS install, and I'm sorry for whatever newbie errors I've committed. I haven't used FreeBSD much, and especially not on my own hardware, so my ability to solve boot-related problems is limited.

Now, to the matter at hand. I'm trying to install FreeNAS onto a HP DL180 G6. I have a SanDisk 8 GB USB stick intended for use as a boot drive. I don't have any form of CD-ROM drive, so I imaged the USB stick using FreeNAS-9.2.1.8-RELEASE-x64.img.xz, and I configured the machine to boot off that device.

The results:

That is, loader(8) fails with:

Can't work out which disk we are booting from.
Guessed BIOS device 0xffffffff not found by probes, defaulting to disk0:

can't load 'kernel'​

I understand this is late in the boot process, but I don't know why this can fail in that way. (Doesn't the boot2 BTX server handle disk access in this context?) ls and lsdev have little to say here:

If I hit 3 to go to the loader prompt instead of attempting a multi-/single-user boot, it looks like boot2 can access everything just fine:

show reports what I assume are the correct defaults, including currdev=disk0s1a: and loaddev=disk0s1a:. Toggling ACPI or safe mode results in the same error.

The BIOS is the most recent available, and I went through the BIOS USB settings twiddling everything with no success but plenty of failures. ("Hotplug USB FDD Support" was reported to cause problems, so that's definitely disabled, and it turns out disabling legacy USB prevents USB booting entirely.) Here's my current configuration:

This post lists similar symptoms which were fixed by enabling EHCI hand-off, but it's already enabled. This reply indicates that forcing HDD mode instead of Auto is helpful, so I did that too. Another thread suggests updating the BIOS and toggling all the USB settings.

There are two LSI storage adapters in this system: an IBM M1015 -> LSI 9211-8i and a HP H221/LSI 9205-8e. Both are running the P16 -IT firmware, and both have had their boot ROMs cleared. Between that and disabling the onboard SATA controller, the only storage device visible to the BIOS is the intended boot media.

I re-imaged the USB stick with no change. I imaged a separate USB thumb drive with the FreeNAS ISO and configured it as a CD-ROM, but the BIOS either hangs trying to boot from it (blinking cursor) or gives up (dropping me to PXE), suggesting some type of deficiency in the BIOS emulation.

What should I try next?

 

[willglynn]

I just noticed that the part of the boot process that fails is actually running twice, and only failing the second time:

BTX loader 1.00 BTX version is 1.02
Consoles: internal video/keyboard
BIOS drive C: is disk0
BIOS 615kB/3135872kB available memory

FreeBSD/x86 bootstrap loader, Revision 1.1
(root@build3.ixsystems.com, Sun Sep 28 22:59:45 PDT 2014)

<menu>

Booting…

Consoles: internal video/keyboard
BIOS 615kB/3135872kB available memory

FreeBSD/x86 bootstrap loader, Revision 1.1
(root@build3.ixsystems.com, Sun Sep 28 22:59:45 PDT 2014)
Can't work out which disk we are booting from.
Guessed BIOS device 0xffffffff not found by probes, defaulting to disk0:

can't load 'kernel'​

Docs say this output is from loader(8). I have no idea if it's normal to run twice, though I suspect not.

 

[willglynn]

I poked around the downloads server and found a file named FreeNAS-9.2.1.8-RELEASE-x64.usb. I didn't find any mention of this in the FreeNAS Guide or other obvious bits of documentation, so I put it on a thumb drive and rebooted. I was greeted by a GRUB menu indicating I had found a FreeNAS Installer USB image:

I copied it to a different thumb drive, plugged it into the front panel, wiped the SanDisk device I intended to use for booting, and rebooted again. I then booted the installer, told it to install onto the right device, and let it run:

Eventually it told me to remove the CD-ROM and reboot. I unplugged the thumb drive, hit OK, selected reboot, and found that… actually, the menu doesn't work any more, so I guess it meant for me to remove the media later. A quick ipmitool power reset later, I found that the system actually finds a kernel:

…and in fact it appears to boot all the way into FreeNAS:

So… what is the .usb image? Does it do anything besides just unpacking the .img.xz onto the selected block device? Why did this work?

 

[cyberjock]

I don't have an answer for you unfortunately. I know the DL180 G6 I tested wouldn't boot FreeNAS no matter what I tried. I just figured after about 2 days of trying things the hardware just wasnt compatible. When I looked up the serial number for the box it didn't list FreeBSD as a supported OS, so I just assumed the worst and gave up at that point.

 

[willglynn]

I saw a bunch of other posts from people running on the DL180 G6, so I figured it had to work somehow… though now that I review them, I think every last one might have been booting off the stock HP RAID card.

Going back through my screenshots, I noticed something else that seemed weird. According to the IO-capable loader prompt, ls boot/ says boot/kernel is a directory, but ls boot/kernel/ says it isn't:

I don't know. The answer might be here somewhere – or I can be content with having a working FreeNAS install and move on. (I should probably back up that thumb drive, huh.)