Installation Assistance

[Jhilbert_Griffon]

Thank you all for your patience with me. I am new to this level of computer building: I have been researching and reading these and other forums for days now trying to help myself with no luck.

I am building a 4 hard drive NAS. I am building it on an ASRock J5040-ITX motherboard with a Intel processor.
The default software is the ASrock UEFI setup.

I have downloaded and flashed TrueNas Core on several flash drives using several different flashing programs (Rufus and Etcher) and no matter what I do, I cannot get the boot sequence to begin. anytime that I select the USB to boot, the system freezes.

Would anyone have any idea or have any experience installing TrueNas using the ASRock UEFI platform?

Thank you.

 

[Redcoat]

Welcome to the forums. Your issue is not uncommon here, some persistence may be required.

Did you verify the downloaded ISO? - method at https://www.truenas.com/docs/core/gettingstarted/install/

Once you have a known good iso, install to a quality flash drive and try again - some have found that a USB2 port can give more predictable results than USB3.

 

[Jhilbert_Griffon]

Thank you for the response. I just spent some time re-downloading the TrueNas ISO and doing the verification of the Key as well as the checksum.

I have only been using 2.0 USB Drives, and still getting the same result where my boot sequence is freezing the machine and/or not booting at all.

I will try again to double check all of my verification especially with the PGP key verification, that was the only part that was giving me some "not-perfect" results (Probably because I downloaded a new software for it and not sure how to use it properly). I am just hoping that answer is not that I need to purchase new hardware.

 

[Redcoat]

Try win32diskimager https://win32diskimager.org/ if rufus or balenaetcher are not kind to you.

 

[NugentS]

The Realtek RTL8111H network card if you use it is likely to cause you issues at some point. Not much you can do about it though - the PCIe slot availability on that board is atrocious.

I would suggest checking that the BIOS on the motherboard is up to date as a possible fix to boot problems

Your hardware is not optimal.

1. No ECC (optional but recommended)
2. Realtek NIC (highly discouraged)
3. 8GB Memory (max), minimum for TrueNAS (I run one in 8GB and for the purpose its fine)
4. Consumer grade hardware (discouraged)

Make sure your HDD's aren't Shingled

 

[Jhilbert_Griffon]

I will give this set up one more go. I have updated all the firmware on the hardware side and see where that takes me.

Thank you again for the advice and opinions

 

[Evertb1]

I am not familiar with your motherboard but as far as I know it is supoposed to autodetect legacy boot devices. Maybe it helps to disable secure boot in your bios then restart and force it to the boot menu. With any luck it presents you with a bios version of the flash drive. Select it and see what happens.