Stuck at Loading Operating System...

[Saz]

SOLVED! See below for my reply to my own issue.

OK. I had FreeNAS running for over a year and the current version is 9.10 something.

I started getting messages that my boot drive was over 80%.

I removed all other bootable instances but still ended up at 88%.

I had 2 16GB Sandisk usb drives (sticks) in a mirror configuration. Not sure why a single instance would take up 12GB of space but I decided I might as well upgrade the USB drives.

I bought 2 64GB Samsung USB drives.

I removed one of the existing 16GB USB drives and replaced it with one of the 64GB drives. HOWEVER, since these new drives are USB3.0 I went ahead and put the new drive in a USB3.0 slot (the others were in USB2.0 slots).

The resilver process was extremely slow, but seemed to work.

I repeated the exact same process once the resilvering was done with the other USB drive; including putting the new drive in a different slot for USB3.0.

The resilver process was just as slow, but seemed to work.

According to the GUI, everything looked hunky dory except for the fact that it was still only recognizing the 16GB still.

I went in to the terminal and discovered that the auto-resize was turned off for the boot drive so I turned it on.

I then told zfs to bring one of the drives in the mirrored pool online (per instructions I found on Google) and the pool was then recognized as 64GB (58GB actually).

Everything up to now seemed great. Until I rebooted the system.

Now I am stuck at this "Loading Operating System..." on the directly connected monitor.

My first thought was that there is a problem with my USB3.0 controller, making everything very slow. I waited for an hour but it was still stuck at this screen.

I rebooted the server and physically moved the two new USB drives to the original slots that the original USB drives were in and I am getting the same result.

Any help is very much appreciated!

 

[Sakuru]

Resizing the boot pool can be weird. I recommend booting your old sticks, grab your config file, install a fresh copy of the latest 9.10 on your new sticks, import your config file.

 

[Saz]

Thanks for the reply. Wanted everyone to know what happened because I am back up now.

In short, I downloaded the latest ISO and flashed one of my 64GB sticks with it using the win32diskimager program. The install/upgrade is pretty awesome because it recovered everything nicely. I used one of the new 64GB sticks as the install media and the other as the bootable drive to install to.

Apparently I didn't really pay close attention when the resilvering was happening during the original replacement to the new larger sticks because I did notice errors with grub in the console on the GUI but I stupidly didn't think much of it. This is important because when I was watching the local console during the upgrade just now, it was showing that grub was not installed on the bootable drive. THIS is why I was sitting at a "Loading Operating System..." prompt. It is likely that the whole drive was corrupted because now my used space on the 64GB stick is ONLY 492.8mb! Remember that the thing the prompted this whole process was the fact that my 16GB stick was showing 12GB in use with only one bootable image on it!

So, all in all, if you experience wierd issues with your boot drive, the solution is as follows:

1. Download the latest ISO from freenas to a computer (I used Windows 10 64-bit)
2. Download and install win32diskimager.exe from the sourceforge site.
3. Put your usb stick in the computer where you downloaded items 1 & 2.
4. Run the win32diskimager software AS AN ADMINISTRATOR
5. Write the ISO image to the usb stick. Don't worry about the warning it gives about corruption.
6. Safely unmount the usb stick and put it in your freenas server as the only usb stick (I am assuming you already have your BIOS set properly to boot from this stick)
7. Boot the freenas server and wait for the menu to appear
8. Put your second usb stick in the freenas server. The console should show that it has been mounted.
9. Choose the install/upgrade menu item.
10. Choose the USB stick that you just inserted. When I was at this point, the installer was showing ALL of my drives. MAKE SURE you pick the usb stick!
11. Choose to upgrade.
12. Let it do its thing. For me, it found the config automatically and applied it!
13. When it asks, reboot the machine and pull out the usb stick that you used for the installer (the one you blasted the ISO on to)
13. After initial boot, for me, it first upgraded some database and rebooted again, then it was up and running and I was able to get to the web gui with all of the settings I had before!
14. Since there is only one usb stick installed right now, when you go to system->boot->status in the gui it will show as a stripe. If you want to mirror, simply put the usb stick back that you used as install media (or any other stick identical to the one you are using for the boot media) WHILE THE SYSTEM IS LIVE (don't reboot!), click once on the line that says stripe, click the attach button that shows up at the bottom and you will be prompted with a member disk list. It should show the other usb stick. Click on attach disk and let it do its thing.
15. When it is done you should be completely back up and running with your new mirrored usb sticks running the latest AND you should only show about 800-900MB of space used.