New motherboard, boot USB seems not to be detected (FreeNAS 9.10.2-U6)

[GLaDER]

Good morning,

I became a victim of the C2750 BMC memory bug and had to retire my old motherboard. Today I installed my new SuperMicro A2SDi-4C-HLN4F with an Atom C3558 and the system POST fine. However, my old boot USB seems not to work. I have tried both the onboard USB-3 contact on the motherboard and using a USB adapter to the USB 2/3 header. I have changed the order of the desired boot media such that all network is second to last and uefi shell is last (hence I assume that the system actually tries to boot all versions of USB mediums, harddrives (none plugged in at the moment) and CD/DVD readers (none of those plugged in either).

The system will say that it is looking for bootable media (don't remember the exact text, but I hope you get the gist) and eventually it will try to boot over the network. When this fails the system falls back to the UEFI shell.

My questions are the following:

1. Could it be that my new mobo runs UEIF and that I ran legacy BIOS on my old mobo -- hence the USB is not compatible? (I do not remember if I ran UEFI on my ASRock C2750 D4i or not.)
2. If UEFI / BIOS is the likely issue, is it possible to convert a FreeNAS 9.10.2-U6 USB in such a way that I do not lose my configs? Keep in mind that I do not have any other server HW available, so "boot the USB on another server and..."-solutions will be difficult to do :(
   
3. If I have to do a fresh install, is there any way to extract my configs from the old install? I'm thinking mostly about jails, nfs-shares, ssh-keys, etc.

Thank you in advance.

 

[joeschmuck]

First of all you should have retained a copy of your config file. We tell people that all the time. But that doesn't help you right now.

I do not have the same motherboard that you have but I'll try to talk you though this. You need to setup your motherboard to boot up BIOS/Legacy only, no UEFI, no Dual Boot, this is a BIOS Setup change. Also if you have USB 2.0 ports then use one of those for now if possible.

Report your results.

 

[GLaDER]

I am fully aware about my negligence w.r.t. the config backup.

Regarding booting in Legacy mode, can you confirm this is at all possible given the motherboard I list above? I did my best to find such an option in the SuperMicro Setup but was unable to do find such an option.

EDIT: I found this thread, and it seems indeed like there is no legacy mode on the board.

 

[joeschmuck]

can you confirm this is at all possible given the motherboard I list above?

No I can not. The user manual is not available for download so I cannot view it.

So lets say that you cannot boot up your USB drive, that is still okay. Grab a different drive and reinstall the version of FreeNAS you were using on your system, get it working. Then you can plug in your old bootable drive and pull the freenas-v1.db file off of it and install it tot he new drive. Do a Google search on how to recover the freenas-v1.db file, something like "freenas recover freenas-v1.db" and you should find it pretty quick. Read before you do anything. If your system dataset is on your pool then your data will be there. But your best bet is to try and get that original USB flash drive to boot if possible. And you know that you could use any computer to do this, basically. Just don't do anything to the internal hard drives and that computer will be safe. I prefer to disconnect my hard drives if I'm doing something like this, it just give me that extra peace of mind.

 

[GLaDER]

Thank you for your reply. I will look into this.

If I am willing to start from scratch w.r.t. the configs, I assume it is possible to simply mount the old disks (with the data intact of course) in a new install (of either 9.10.2-U6 or 11.1) and treat the installation as new. Could you confirm this? Are there any differences between the versions such that moving pools between versions is not supported?

If I were to move to FreeNAS 11, I am worried about my current jails. I have no "plugin jails" (or whatever they are called) but only FreeBSD-jails. I would however not be surprised if 9.10 jails functioned poorly running in a FreeNAS 11 environment. What I am posing is simply to start from scratch with respect to the configurations I've done on my old system, but it would be painful to re-install all the jails.

 

[joeschmuck]

Yes, you could perform a new clean installation of FreeNAS (do not use 11.1, it's still in testing) and then you can import your pool. Your jails may not function properly but the data would be in them. If your system dataset was on your pool then you could recover the config file and then all would work fine. I'd stick with your old FreeNAS version for now and consider rebuilding when FreeNAS 11.2 comes to the streets.

 

[GLaDER]

Thank you for your reply.

It seems like my motherboard is too new for 9.10 and I will need to move to FreeNAS 11 [LINK]. Hence, I have narrowed down my options. I have created a fresh FreeNAS 11 USB and I attempted to extract the old config file by following the instructions HERE. Unfortunately, after performing: zpool import -f -R /mnt the_ID_of_the_pool new_pool_name, I cannot find the new_pool_name in /mnt. However, zfs list will properly list all subdirs on the old boot drive. Maybe I am simply doing something wrong here?

Regardless, since I have to move to FreeNAS 11 anyway (due to the NIC issue) I'm thinking that maybe it's better to start from scratch. I have installed the system and confirmed that I can reach the WebGUI. I set the language, keymap and time-zone and then opted not to import any pools. It shouldn't take more than a couple of hours to setup a new environment. Importing my old pool (from FreeNAS 9.10.2-U6) to FreeNAS 11 should be as simple as booting up the system and importing the old volume in the GUI, right?

I guess I just have to wing it with the jails and see if they'll work. (Plex, ZNC and Nextcloud are the most important ones. Neither should take long to reconfigure.)

Thank you for your help, any last words before I try to import the old pool into FreeNAS 11?

 

[joeschmuck]

any last words before I try to import the old pool into FreeNAS 11?

If your pool is encrypted, do not use FreeNAS 11.1-RC1, RC2, RC3. In RC1 the encrypted pool was destroyed immediately. This "should" have been fixed in RC3 however unless you have a full backup of your data, I wouldn't take the risk. Stick with FreeNAS 11.0-U4 for now.

If your jails do not work as expected then I'd recommend deleting them all in the GUI first and then deleting the jails directory, lastly configure a new jails directory so the current FreeBSD template can be downloaded and you would end up using that. But your jails may work fine as-is.

 

[GLaDER]

Thank you for your help!

My pool is not encrypted.

I installed FreeNAS 11.1-RC1 as the documentation states it as the latest stable release. I had already imported the pool when I read your comment, but I have changed no flags. Due to the NIC issues with Atom C3000 I must stay with the 11.1 for now, I assume I can switch the track to Stable in the GUI as soon as 11.* (* > 0) is considered Stable?

 

[joeschmuck]

as the documentation states it as the latest stable release.

That needs to be removed. During Release Candidates this link is invalid and you can get a bad build. If RC1 is working for you, just cross your fingers that it stays this way. I had this link in the top of the forums changed to point to the latest stable release which is 11.0-U4.

I assume I can switch the track to Stable in the GUI as soon as 11.* (* > 0) is considered Stable?

Yes, you should be able to however since there are issues with upgrading between RCs, you might need to backup your config file and then install 11.1-Release and restore your config file.

 

[dlavigne]

Thanks for the reminder. The URL recently changed, I'll update the Guide.