No keyboard, no boot ! Stuck on TrueNAS initial install on a working server.

[jgreco]

MBD-X12SAE-5-0 which I believe is indeed, a "server grade" motherboard.

It is not. The "A" in the model number is the giveaway, it's a workstation grade board. This can be similar to a server board in that it may use high quality components, but it may have different BIOS settings that are optimized for running Windows or something like that.

 

[lcraf]

It's not, it's a workstation board.

Hahaha, oh fancy that. Must be my issue.

Have you tried the keyboard settings that are typically prominent in AMI setup menus? There is typically not much more to configure, so if that doesn't work, you would probably have really research and analyze this if you want to track it down.

Funny thing is, I couldn't find the usual setting to not require a keyboard. I found one to not halt on errors, and that got it past the BIOS. But now I'm stuck at at grub. I just figured since it got to grub, BIOS shouldn't be the issue any more. Never had this happen.

Maybe I'll dig into the board, look again at the settings. And maybe look into if it's something a BIOS update might fix.

 

[Ericloewe]

I just figured since it got to grub, BIOS shouldn't be the issue any more.

The system firmware is, practically speaking, always involved until a real OS has loaded far enough to take control of USB devices (the situation is more complex with PS/2 peripherals).
Unless GRUB is doing something weird (which would sadly not be surprising either), the issue suggests that GRUB is receiving a spurious button press event. It's not clear at all why this would happen due to a lack of a keyboard...

In any case, one possible workaround is to use ZFS Boot Menu as the bootloader. The good part is that you get rid of GRUB, but you have manually install it. Other users have reported that it just works with TrueNAS, with the default configuration, so it boils down to placing the EFI executable in the EFI system partition and having UEFI boot to it.
All that said, it's not clear that this would solve your issue, but worth a shot.