SOLVED More USB install confusion

[David Dyer-Bennet]

Not my first FreeNAS install, but a new one.

Installing 9.3 Stable (current download 4-Dec). I've used Win32DiskImager to put the ISO onto a 16GB usb drive. The destination system (after a short discussion with the BIOS) sees the USB drive and boots from it.

However, when I choose the install option, the "Choose destination media" dialog is messed up. It only shows one line, although there are two hard drives and the USB device present. (Or sometimes *two* USB devices, but nothing ever recognized the second one.) Furthermore, after initially showing "ada0", if I hit the up arrow or the plus "+" key, it changes to showing ada10 -- and won't change back no matter what I hit. Screenshots of both states attached.

The installation instructions are unclear; do I gather, from the forums, that I need one USB to boot from and a *second* USB to install onto? (Or I could install from CD or something else; but let's say I'm using USB.) They may need to be in USB 2 ports (avoiding USB 3 ports). They need to be FAT32 format? (Not exFAT?)

As a test, I installed onto one of my hard drives. That worked, and I could then reboot the system from the hard drive, get to it via WebGUI, etc. But of course I don't actually want to dedicate one of my hard drives as the boot device, I want to boot form a USB device.

 

[dlavigne]

From http://doc.freenas.org/9.3/freenas_intro.html#compact-or-usb-flash:

Note: if you will be burning the installation file to a USB stick, you will need two USB slots, each with an inserted USB device, where one USB stick contains the installer and the other USB stick is selected to install into. When performing the installation, be sure to select the correct USB device to install to. In other words, you can not install FreeNAS® into the same USB stick that you boot the installer from. After installation, remove the USB stick containing the installer, and if necessary, configure the BIOS to boot from the remaining USB stick.

 

[David Dyer-Bennet]

Got it going, but not clear exactly what I had wrong the first time . What formats are acceptable on the USB sticks? FAT32, EXFAT? (I assume not NTFS!). FAT32 is what's actually working in my installation.

USB3 was definitely *not* the problem -- this motherboard doesn't have USB 3 .

But...the system shows a strong preference to boot into the old test environment installed on one of the disks in preference to the USB key, despite the boot order in the BIOS putting the USB key first. Is this actually possible, or must I be somehow confused? It would require the code on the USB key to find and transfer to the code on the hard drive, which seems unlike something one would program as the default behavior for anything like freeNas. This is weird enough behavior that, if it really happens, I'd like to document it for future reference. And if not, I need to prove to myself that it doesn't, so I can stop worrying about it.

I've disconnected the drives with that on it, and I'm going to wipe them somehow (probably with a Linux live CD; FreeBSD seems to object to randomly overwriting the image it booted from). So I'm going to win this one, and will soon have all six disks running I expect. (6 being the number of controllers on this motherboard).

 

[danb35]

Format doesn't matter, the boot device is reformatted as ZFS anyway.

 

[Robert Trevellyan]

Is this actually possible, or must I be somehow confused?

I often encounter situations where a machine won't boot from USB unless the device was plugged in at cold boot time. Could this explain your observations?

 

[David Dyer-Bennet]

I often encounter situations where a machine won't boot from USB unless the device was plugged in at cold boot time.

I think it's possible. I'm going to investigate some more today, if I can actually document any weird behavior I'll post it. But I appear to have a clear path to getting my actual backup server up and running, and at some point I'll just complete that and stop playing around.

 

[David Dyer-Bennet]

Can't really establish with certainty what was going on with USB boot; so I'm writing it off to me having done something screwy the first day. It works reliably now, *and* I was able to boot an Ubuntu live-USB also (to overwrite the start of all my disk drives, because the FreeNAS boot insisted on attaching itself to an old test installation on one one of my disks, and I couldn't figure out any way to resolve the problem within FreeNAS; however dd'ing 10MB of zeros over the start of each disk resolved it just fine).

 

[Robert Trevellyan]

Can't really establish with certainty what was going on with USB boot

You'll know that boot order is still an issue if when you restart FreeNAS, you get a message along the lines of "this disk is part of a RAID set" instead of the FreeNAS boot sequence.