Morning All - trouble booting off USB install

[DAXQ]

I have an iXsystems FreeNAS-Mini-3.0-E+ running TureNAS 12.0-U2.1 Core that has been stuck @ 12.0-U2.1 for some time now (I tried updating it via normal means, but it refused to do the install during reboot and reverted back to 12.0-U2. Recommendations where to just backup the config, reinstall a current OS version, and restore the config). The last time I was able to get to time to try and reinstall the OS - I had a very difficult time getting this hardware to boot off a USB stick I had set up. So much trouble that I eventually stopped trying to install the new OS and left it at 12.0. I have another opportunity to get this system up to date and wondered if anyone had any suggestions to getting it to boot off a USB install stick like the old Mini's? I created a new USB boot disk (13.0-U5), took it home and moved my home system (an older iXsystems FREENASMINI-8TB-IXN) from a test Scale system back to Core to try out and verify the media - it worked fine (as expected anyway on my older iXsystem mini). These newer Mini's seem to be doing something different to get it to boot off the USB and any suggestions or steps would be greatly appreciated. I will have physical access to box and can get into the management interface if needed (never make use of this interface and not very familiar with it). Aside from being out of date - it has also lost one of its mirrored boot drives, so I plan to take it down and correctly label all the drives externally, replace the failed boot mirror drive (with a new Supermicro SSD-DM032-SMCMVN1 32GB SATA DOM) and put a fresh install of 13.0-u5 if I can get it to boot off the USB stick! So any steps or suggestions getting it to boot off the USB Stick would be greatly appreciated! I use these boxes solely as means for mass storage for my users doing simple SMB shares - nothing fancy or complicated and they have worked fantastically up to now.

 

[DAXQ]

Very Odd thing happened, since I never got a reply - I tried rebooting everything and the boot session it was stuck on let go. It finally went to 12.0-u5 and booted. So I let it update, rebooted a few times everything seemed fine. Then I changed to 13 - stable train - updated, booted, everything fine. Thought it was all working well - tried mapping a drive from a windows computer - path not found - none of the maps were working. Digging into it - the path on the share was wrong - it was pointing to a much older path for some reason. Something I had changed years ago. Shares that I had created were gone as well along with some of the users? Almost as if it had rolled back to a much older config. I am going to try and upload the config I created just before the upgrade and see what happens.

 

[DAXQ]

Yup - old config file - trying to get back things I was missing rolled back everything I fixed - pretty simple fixes so far, but very unexpected. The config file was an old config file even the one I downloaded just before upgrading - how can that happen? I took quite a few pictures before (just in case) glad I did - gonna be a few shares and setups a little hard to recreate but so far I THINK all the data is fine, but whos to say? Very very scary IMO.

 

[Davvo]

That's why it's nice to always have an updated configuration file backup.

 

[DAXQ]

That's why it's nice to always have an updated configuration file backup.

The config file was updated - that's why it was scary - I downloaded the bad config file right before the update ran?

 

[Davvo]

If you uploaded a config file after the update and it was an old one I believe that's on you.
If you downloaded right before the update and it was an old one you might have (had?) issues with the boot pool.

 

[DAXQ]

I created the config file (date time stamp) just before the upgrade. The downloaded (supposedly current config) was not current - it pulled and old config for some reason. Don't even know how that's possible to do. The install was definitely in a muddied state - possibly the cause - but I didn't just upload a random old config file I uploaded the one the system just had me create. That's why I find it scary. I'm certainly not trying to instigate anything, just made an observation. Oddly all my ACLs and permissions were fine, only had to create one user and group - so want that bad, but it was scary and questions about how it even happened.

 

[Davvo]

I guess your previous update attempts might have messed up something.

 

[DAXQ]

Here is what I am guessing happened - I tried to up date from U2.1 to U5 and it failed and rolled back to U2.1 - I tried to boot to usb to reinstall U5 (and could not) - never could get it to boot off USB (hence the original post) and the system had a U2.1 (on NOW in the boot pool) with a U5 on reboot that never took <-- I think this what was holding on to an old Config file. That was a year ago, and the server hummed merrily along and I made needed changes to the pools, shares, users and groups etc... not realizing that I should have deleted that On Reboot U5. When I rebooted the server today to try and do the maintenance - it flipped into that U5 - restoring an Old Config file - I did not expect that as the U5 boot was consistently failing a couple of months ago. I think that is how the old boot config got into my system. Once I noticed (excitedly) it actually updated to U5 - I thought lets push it further and see if we can avoid boot from USB altogether - I changed the train to 13 - downloaded a config file at prompt and ran the update (that config file was from an old system). However my Pools kept their ACL's and everything from the new config - luckily, all I needed to do was recreate the user/group ensuring their ID's were correct - clean up the incorrect paths - and everything was working as expected. If that is possible for my understanding - 100% my fault for not removing that failed U5 that was sitting idle ready to decide to randomly work.