SOLVED Mountroot prompt when using Hyper-V VM

[okibcn]

Well, I spend one full day trying to setup FreeNAS 11-RC in a Hyper-V test environment. The host was a Windows 10 Pro x64 AU and I always got stuck at the mountroot prompt even dough the drive /dev/da0 was properly partitioned during installation, and the flash process using the ISO image seemed to be good in a test virtual drive of 16GB.

I tried using 9.10, same issue.
I checked the fingerprint of the downloaded images to ensure the iso downloads were fine. They were.
I tried VHD and VHDX.
I tried fixed and expandable drives.
I tried using the drive in the IDE and SCSI virtual devices
I tried Generation 1 and Generation 2
I tried BIOS and UEFI boots.
I tried to clean the partition doing gpart destroy -F da0 before installing
I tried mountroots as ufs and zfs
I tried multiple devices such as /dev/da0, /dev/da0p1, /dev/da0p2, freenas-boot/ROOT/default, ...
I tried to edit the grub config as suggested in the setup instructions, adding set kFreeBSD.kern.cam.boot_delay="50000" in the normal boot section

At the same time I made Google consume hundreds of KWh searching for a method to make it work. This morning I tried using the legacy 8.3. It doesn't have the drivers for Hyper-V so I added the Legacy Network Adapter. It installed without any problem. Then I tried to install again the FreeNAS 11-RC and it worked!!!!!!

After a few tests I have identified the issue. FreeNAS 9.10 and above doesn't properly boot if the Legacy Network Adapter is not present in the system, stopping in the infamous mountroot prompt. This is really weird, after everything is setup, FreeNAS is actually using the Virtual Network Adapter and not the Legacy Network Adapter.

I am not a FreeBSD expert but it is really weird that a network adapter could be affecting the file system mount. Anyway, I hope I could avoid many others the painful experience I had yesterday.

 

[dlavigne]

This is supposed to be fixed in 11. RC2 is due out early next week, please create a bug report at bugs.freenas.org (and post the issue number here) if the issue persists after upgrading to that version.

 

[xrstokes]

I just installed version 11 and can confirm that this is still an issue. To make hyper-v boot and get rid of error 19, just add a legacy NIC and connect it to something. Otherwise, hyper-v performance seems good. TAGS: "hyper v" "error 2" "error 19" "booting"

 

[xrstokes]

https://bugs.freenas.org/issues/24562

 

[techexec]

I just tried to use current FREENAS 11.0-U2 as a VM with HYPER-V and can confirm the same problem reported above still exists with incomplete boot. After supplying the VM with both a virtual switch and legacy LAN adapter (thanks for suggestion OK - never dawned on me to try this), the VM booted up fine and allowed me to get an IP address and log in as normal. This confirms the problem reported here still exists in the latest version.

Having said that I ran into another problem relating to SCSI drives attached to HYPER-V VM with FREENAS 11.0-U2. They are not visible. I think someone else reported this in the forum as well. IDE defined drives still work but not SCSI but this limits you to 3 units. I ran into this exact same problem on competitive product NAS4FREE 11.1 NAS as well running under HYPER-V and have concluded this issue with with FREEBSD 11. Problem did not exist with NAS product using FREEBSD 10.X. FREENAS 11 seems to use the FREEBSD-STABLE platform while NAS4FREE uses the FREEBSD-RELEASE platform but both have this issue.