System fails to reboot, blinking cursor

[ChiknNutz]

I have been in the process of replacing a failed hard drive. As of this morning, my Freenas box has been working just fine with no issues, aside from the failed drive. I powered off the box to test another drive that seems to be in the process of failing. I then went did as I have done many times before and now the system won't reboot, it just sits with a blinking cursor on the upper LH corner of the screen (I have a monitor connected to it while I am performing the disk diagnosis). I know it takes a bit to boot up, but I have let it sit for at least 15 minutes and it just sits there. I have tried this a number of times now, have went into the BIOS to ensure it is set to boot from the USB drive...and yes it is. Another oddity I have noted is sometimes when I restart it, the USB lights may or may not light up during that particular restart attempt. This doesn't seem right. At any rate, my previously working system no longer is and for no apparent reason since I have made zero changes to anything during this time. I had already replaced the first failed drive and the system had finished resilvering and was working fine just a few hours ago. Any ideas here?

 

[SweetAndLow]

Boot device failed. Need to replace it

Sent from my Nexus 5X using Tapatalk

 

[gpsguy]

Your flash drive probably died.

Get a new one (or two [mirror the boot devices]) and re-install the same version of FreeNAS that you had been using before. Skip the setup wizard. If you have a copy of the configuration file, you can restore it and be back in business. If not, you'll need to import the volume and reconfigure your settings.

 

[ChiknNutz]

I have two USB drives on the system (mirrored), both have failed at the same time? That seems statistically improbable. I have a third USB stick that is still unopened just in the event one has failed.

 

[gpsguy]

Yank one of the flash drives and see if it will boot off the other one. If not, try the other one. Then try plan B.

 

[ChiknNutz]

Weird...I had already swapped the USB drives...one on the MB, one on the outside of the case with same result. Then removed the one on the MB entirely and rebooted, now in the process of booting up properly. Why so finicky?

 

[BigDave]

Why so finicky?

It's USB Sir!
Around here, the troubles you are having are just totally normal and very common.
Tired of it? Switch to a higher quality boot device, don't have an open SATA port,
buy a four port SATA PCIe expansion card and boot a small SSD off that...