[SCALE-22.02-RC.2] "grub-install: error: unknown filesystem" during install

[JJ White]

Hi there,

I've been forced to create an account and start a thread on this forum because I can't get TrueNAS SCALE to install on my home NAS. I previously ran FreeNAS for three years (On different boot media, but I got sick of USB flash drives dying) Here is the hardware I'm working with for this install:

• Intel Core i5 4590 (4c/4t Haswell)
• Gigabyte G1 Sniper B6 (B85 Express Chipset)
  • UEFI boot enabled, all legacy boot features disabled.
  • Audio disabled
  • VT-x and VT-d enabled
• 24GB DDR3-1600 (Passed full memtest86, 4 passes of all tests)
• Storage
  • 2x Intel Optane M10 (16GB) in RTL9210 NVME to USB3 enclosure (Intended boot pool, clean GPT table)
  • 3x 1TB Micron sata SSD (Clean GPT table)
  • 2x 4TB WD RED (Existing ZFS pool to be imported after install)
  • 1x 2TB HDD (Has existing NTFS partitions, not used for anything yet)
  • 1x 512GB Samsung 950 Pro (Clean GPT table, not used yet)

I have prepared a boot media using a Ventoy USB and I have validated the "TrueNAS-SCALE-22.02-RC.2.iso" file using the provided SHA256 hash. I have also tried writing the image to a new flash drive without Ventoy on it using Balena Etcher, but this changed nothing.

There are no issues booting the installer, I have made a screenshot of the disk setup before installing using "lsblk"

Then I proceed to install and select my two USB NVME drives for the boot pool.

This is where the error occurs, when performing the post install tasks. It also says the partition table size is 0 bytes, which seems odd but I'd just before created a new GPT partition table using GParted on a Ubuntu live image so I assume the GPT table makes sense.

And a print of "lsblk" after this error, showing there are new partitions on the target drives.

To make matters more interesting, I've previously tried to install SCALE to the same two drives on a completely different system with an ASROCK J4205-ITX and no other drives attached, which produced the exact same error. This leads me to believe it has something to do with the "unique" set of boot drives I want to use. Weirdly enough, Proxmox has no problems installing to them and booting from them and Windows can also use the drives without problems.

I'd love to hear what I can do to fix this issue, or if I need to gather more information.

Greetings,

JJ

 

[JJ White]

I have searched the forums before posting for similar issues, but the most similar issue I found was people upgrading to SCALE having grub-install report an error about ZFS not supporting blocklists, which is fixed according to the JIRA issue: https://jira.ixsystems.com/browse/NAS-112296 .

 

[JJ White]

Update: I was pretty sure I tried to install to only one boot drive on my old setup (The Asrock J4205-ITX), but now that I tried it on the new system (i5-4590) it worked. I installed to a single USB NVME drive and after the install was complete and the system rebooted I added the other one to the boot pool.

That fixes (works around?) my problem, maybe still worth looking at what caused the issue in the first place...

 

[NugentS]

Wierd. Also its nice to see someone else using the M10 Optanes as boot drives. They really are dirt cheap

 

[maamux]

Update: I was pretty sure I tried to install to only one boot drive on my old setup (The Asrock J4205-ITX), but now that I tried it on the new system (i5-4590) it worked. I installed to a single USB NVME drive and after the install was complete and the system rebooted I added the other one to the boot pool.

That fixes (works around?) my problem, maybe still worth looking at what caused the issue in the first place...

I'm having exactly the same error, the only difference is that I'm trying to install to a single Sandisk SSD.

I have pretty similar hardware specs, either an i5-4570 or 4590, can't remember and i'm not near the machine, but I'm working with 4GB of RAM ( more than enough for my use case, I've been running it virtualized with slightly less than that), a single boot drive and 2 WD black 2TB for storage. Did you try anything different on the install that succeeded ?

 

[JJ White]

I'm having exactly the same error, the only difference is that I'm trying to install to a single Sandisk SSD.

I have pretty similar hardware specs, either an i5-4570 or 4590, can't remember and i'm not near the machine, but I'm working with 4GB of RAM ( more than enough for my use case, I've been running it virtualized with slightly less than that), a single boot drive and 2 WD black 2TB for storage. Did you try anything different on the install that succeeded ?

Sorry for the late reply, but no I don't think I did. As I said I did change to a completely different system which seems to have made a difference for installing to a single boot device, but it didn't seem to make a difference when trying to do a mirrored install. Both times I made sure to remove all existing partitions on the boot drives, remove all signs of the old boot partitions, and even validated my install USB with the checksum.

Update: So yeah, I still ran into this issue with the latest TrueNAS SCALE 22.02.4 on the J4205 machine and the workaround is indeed to first install to a single boot device and then attach the second one to the boot pool after installation.