Installing and booting to Freenas

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Adam96

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So I installed FreeNAS on an old system, a Dell with a Pentium 3 processor and 256 mb of RAM. It said to take out the disc and restart. I restarted and took out the disc. For some reason I can't boot to the OS regardless of what I set in the boot order in the BIOS. How can I fix this? NOTE: I have a Windows OS on another hd on that computer.
 

ProtoSD

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Do you see any indication at all that it's attempting to boot from your USB flash drive?
The Windows OS on the hard drive won't cause this to happen.
I'd say even if you do notice that it's attempting to boot from USB, that you'll have trouble running FreeNAS with 256MB of RAM.
Can you boot any other type of OS from USB flash disk? Like Ubuntu, or some type of diagnostic?
 

Adam96

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Do you see any indication at all that it's attempting to boot from your USB flash drive?
The Windows OS on the hard drive won't cause this to happen.
I'd say even if you do notice that it's attempting to boot from USB, that you'll have trouble running FreeNAS with 256MB of RAM.
Can you boot any other type of OS from USB flash disk? Like Ubuntu, or some type of diagnostic?






Well it is installed currently on a second IDE hard drive. The first one has windows and boots to that not FreeNAS. I have tried booting FreeNAS on USB and it does the same. However, a long time ago I've tried booting Ubuntu server to USB and it worked but it seemed messed up so I switched to Windows on the hard drive because I was able. How is 256 mb not enough, it meets the requirements right? How can I fix this?
 

ProtoSD

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Adam96, are you working with FreeNAS .7x?

For that version 256MB of RAM probably meets the requirements, but version 8.x (notice the 8 before the dot) published minimum is 6GB, though you can make it work with less with varied results, 256MB is just not enough. There's a link at the top of the page for version .7. With version .7 you can boot from a hard drive, but with 8.x you must use a USB flash disk.

You might need to use a partition manager and make sure the drive you're using for FreeNAS is set to 'active', but then things get a little complicated because you'll need a 'boot manager' so that you can choose to boot Windows when you want. I suggest you look at the other link for .7 at the top of the page and see if you can find more info there.

Here's a link to a boot manager that will help, but I can't go into details on how to use it.

http://neosmart.net/dl.php?id=1
 
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