Issue installing 9.3 stable - Hung on vdev guid...

[john-woods]

Hi everyone,

I recently tried to upgrade from FreeNAS 9.2 to 9.3 using the GUI, when the system rebooted it hung forever at 'Verifying DMI Pool Data...' I researched online and this appeared as though my boot drive had become corrupted somehow. In order to test this theory, I decided to try a fresh FreeNAS 9.3 installation using the ISO on a different drive.

My new boot drive was a 16GB CF card, to install I formatted a 16GB USB stick to FAT-32 with MBR using Mac OS X and the ISO was 'burned' using the dd command in the Terminal. The computer started from the USB drive no problem and I was able to select my CF card for installation of FreeNAS. However, the process was unable to complete and gave the following errors:

...
(ada2:ata2:0:0:0): Retrying command
...
(ada2:ata2:0:0:0): CAM status: Command timeout
...
panic: I/O to pool 'freenas-boot' appears to be hung on vdev guid 7176045653299305304 at '/dev/ada2p2'
...



FYI, device ada2 is my CF card.

The USB drive is connected to a USB 2 port on the rear of my computer, the CF card is installed in an ATA-CF adapter that I was using with the previous boot drive. The computer started no problem from an old Ubuntu install I had on the 16GB CF prior to this experiment so I don't believe it's a hardware issue. The motherboard is a Gigabyte GA-D510UD with the latest (F4 version) BIOS, though this is from 2010. The machine has 8GB RAM and has 4 x 2TB HD connected in a ZFS RAID but I don't believe any of this should affect the installation process.

I'm unsure how to proceed or what else to try so any help or advice would be greatly appreciated.

Thanks,
John

 

[cyberjock]

Yeah.. I don't have any advice for you.. that board is a desktop board. As such we don't recommend using it because it is likely to have unique problems.

Unfortunately your two options are to figure it out what is wrong on your own, or look at hardware that is expected to 'just work' with FreeNAS. :/

 

[john-woods]

cyberjock,

Thanks anyway, I didn't exactly figure out what the problem was but I suspected it was related to the CF-IDE adapter. I tried:

• Installing to CF card connected to USB port adapter rather than IDE adapter - Installed but system wouldn't recognise this as a boot drive
• Installing to SD card connected to USB port adapter - Installed but system wouldn't recognise this as a boot device
• Installed using an old Dell D630 laptop, booted to the FreeNAS installer on my USB drive then installed it onto the CF card using a USB adapter. This worked and installed fully, I was then able to put it back in my FreeNAS server in the IDE-CF adapter and boot from it.

So this looks like a success in a way. However, I then had the issue that I could start initially into FreeNAS but if I configured some options and re-booted into the default boot option (rather than 'initial') it would get stuck in an endless loop of errors. I configured everything (mounted volume, setup shares, plug-ins, jails etc.) and now I'm nervous to reboot the machine at all in case it gets stuck in an endless loop of errors again.

Cheers,
John

 

[Ericloewe]

If a CF card connected to a PATA controller won't work, you have serious issues that need fixing.