SOLVED Oh man, what did I do

[objecttothis]

This is reminding me of when I was 14 and first getting into building PCs and tinkering back with MS DOS 6.22. I knew just enough to mess it up big. I'm only learning as I go with FreeBSD and FreeNAS, so I'd say that makes me dangerous.

OK, as a result of my thread here: https://www.truenas.com/community/threads/options-for-not-having-enough-sata-ports.99062/ I purchased a Fujitsu 9211-8i SATA LSI 2008 FW:P20 IT Mode HBA and SFF-8087 to SATA cable. I installed the card in the server and booted it up with no devices connected to the HBA. TrueNAS boots fine per normal, with no warnings (but I have nothing connected to the console). Here is where I start to do the bonehead thing. I made the assumption that this would be somewhat plug-n-play. I gracefully shut the server down and connected my two boot SSDs to the HBA and booted the system again.

The result? TrueNAS does not boot to the point where I can access the WebUI.

Then I thought, OK, this might not be so plug-n-play. I shut the system down and reverted my changes. Plugging the boot SSDs back into their original SATA ports and booted the server back up. Same issue.

To complicate matters, I can't get vKVM working (https://forums.servethehome.com/index.php?threads/cant-vkvm-on-gigabyte-server-board.36013/) and I don't have a monitor connected to the server. I think I'm going to have to do that tomorrow unless I can get the vKVM working.

If I had to guess, I'd say the server doesn't know where the boot drives are. One question I have is "how do I unbork this?" A related question is "What is the proper procedure to make sure that I can connect the boot drives to the HBA and have it boot properly, or is that not a thing?" I was hoping to run the boot SSDs from the HBA and the storage drives from the server board SATA ports. Final question that I hope the answer to this is "no" is "Did I irrevocably lose data?"

 

[objecttothis]

OK, a little progress. I was able to get vKVM working with a jank workaround. To validate my suspicions I was greeted with "This is a FreeNAS data disk and can not boot system. System halted. So it's looking at the wrong drives to boot. I guess I should check the BIOS to see that it's looking at the right boot disk.

 

[objecttothis]

In the BIOS the only boot drive option now is just one of the three storage drives. I powered the server down and checked the connections. I don't really understand why not all the drives would show up... EDIT: OK, I went into Hard Drive BBS Priorities and set the boot drives properly to the SSD's and it boots into TrueNAS as before. Now the only remaining question is how do I do this properly.

 

[Apollo]

Your HBA may not be bootable (lack of INT 13 I think) so it would be safer to used your SSD boot volume on your motherboard SATA controller.
Then set boot in BIOS to boot from the SSD.
After that you should be fine.

 

[objecttothis]

Your HBA may not be bootable (lack of INT 13 I think) so it would be safer to used your SSD boot volume on your motherboard SATA controller.
Then set boot in BIOS to boot from the SSD.
After that you should be fine.

Thanks. I actually was just about to post that I was able to fix it. I reinstalled the HBA and reconnected the boot SSD's to them. In the BIOS PCI settings I was able to configure it to look at the HBA. After save and exit (F10) I went back into the BIOS to find that it now showed the boot SSDs on the HBA! I am back into TrueNAS.