Running system won't boot anymore

[ovizii]

Hi there,

so I have this Hp NL54 microserver with 16GB ECC RAM which was running wonderfully until one day I got home from work and it was dead.

Dead as if I hook it up to a screen, it boots fine past the BIOS but when it comes to booting the OS it gets stuck at a blinking cursor.

About 1 week before this problem cropped up, I had exchanged both USB sticks I was booting off with new and bigger ones as they were quite old and only 8GB (the new ones have 32GB)

I guess I can plug in the old ones and see if it boots but how does one normally debug this?

Fresh install, import config?

 

[hugovsky]

Fresh install, import config?

Safer, faster and easier. You can test the usb stick to see if it has errors. Use badblocks or something like this: www.vconsole.com

 

[SweetAndLow]

If it doesn't boot and you switch to a new boot device that is kind of all the debugging needed. That process your boot device is bad.

I would try your old usb or go get a new one. Better yet get 2 and mirror them to help mitigate this problem.

 

[ovizii]

sorry, forgot to mention that I replaced a mirrored pair of 2x 8GB with another pair of 2x 32Gb (Sandisk)...
Will bring the old ones to work tomorrow and check if it boots with the old ones.
If not, will attempt a fresh install then import my config as I have a daily backup.

Thanks for the advice, will keep the thread updated asap.

 

[ovizii]

the plan:

Boot of 1 of the old sticks, then mirror onto 1 of the new sticks.
system seems stable, survived a few reboots.
Ran all necessary updates, did a few reboots, all seems good.
Next I will replace the old stick with the 2nd new one and mirror.

Reality:

Boot of 1 of the old sticks, then mirror onto 1 of the new sticks.
Reboot. No-Boot.
Unplug new stick. Boot successful.

Plug new USB in while system running, mirror back online.
Reboot.
No-Boot.

Unplug new stick, Reboot Successful.
Plug in new stick, detach the boot mirror.
Did a badblock test on the new USB stick.
Found no issues :-(

Does anyone have an idea or see a pattern?

Running: FreeNAS-9.10-STABLE-201605240427 (64fcd8e)
Just thought I'd mention it but the old sticks were named gptid/xxx while the new ones simply say da1p2, not sure if that sheds any light onto the issues at hand.

Code:

    NAME                                            STATE     READ WRITE CKSUM
    freenas-boot                                    ONLINE       0     0     0
      mirror-0                                      ONLINE       0     0     0
        gptid/5a00b04a-dab1-11e4-a01d-9cb65404505f  ONLINE       0     0     0
        da1p2                                       ONLINE       0     0     0

Next, I formatted the usb stick on my macbook then destroyed all partitioning on it via gpart (on freenas again) then attached the disk to the boot mirror:

Code:

gpart show
=>      34  60062433  da0  GPT  (29G)
        34      1024    1  bios-boot  (512K)
      1058         6       - free -  (3.0K)
      1064  60061400    2  freebsd-zfs  (29G)
  60062464         3       - free -  (1.5K)

=>      34  60062433  da1  GPT  (29G)
        34      1024    1  bios-boot  (512K)
      1058         6       - free -  (3.0K)
      1064  60061400    2  freebsd-zfs  (29G)
  60062464         3       - free -  (1.5K)

It has been running now for more than 24h and survived a few reboots although I have no idea what made it all crash in the first place.