"This is a FreeNAS data disk and can not boot system. System halted" after every update

[jgreco]

When you said you had multiple boot sequences in your BIOS, I think I know what's going on. Your BIOS likely has a timer where a reboot that occurs shortly after a previous boot, and before the timer expires, is considered a failed boot, and triggers the error boot sequence. TrueNAS updates usually complete within 60 seconds, which is likely shorter than your BIOS timer.

Interesting theory. Bonus points for it fitting the general facts here. I was not too happy with the "unknown mechanism causes BIOS to do something not-normal" I previously outlined, since a reboot's a reboot's a reboot. But yeah, if it was seeing rapidly successive reboots as a failure ...

Easy way to test this MIGHT be:

When you get to the boot loader screen, select "reboot" and see what happens.

Or better yet, select "singleuser mode" and then run "reboot".

Obviously making sure you do this very quickly in both cases.

I like it. I'd been thinking of it as a "how would data exit the ecosystem" problem, which is actually something I've been wrestling with using bhyve as a system image generation platform. There's an obvious way to get a one-bit signal out of bhyve that isn't generally applicable to real machines, but such a specifically targeted result on a real machine instigated by a host OS would seem to require very specific arrangment with the BIOS... @Samuel Tai's theory obviously works much better as it becomes an entirely external-to-FreeNAS issue triggered by a quick reboot cycle.

 

[danno]

Interesting theory. In my research using the Lenovo hardware and user manuals, along with searching the forums, I could not find any specific documentation detailing what constitutes an error as detected by the BIOS. As I think I mentioned, the most recent update continued with further updating and invoked another reboot...I didn't exactly time it, but that further updating seemed to take less than 60 seconds, so you'd think it would also have triggered the 'Error' boot sequence (but instead, it went through the 'Primary' sequence just fine).

I supposed it's possible that when the updates were running without incident in previous versions, there have since been changes in the update interface that sped things up just enough that the reboots were now happening within a specific threshold (60 seconds or whatever it may be). I'll be eager to see how the next update goes...if I have time to do some testing before that happens, I'll also post back with the results then.

 

[danno]

Thought it appropriate to post an update: This morning, I installed the 12.0-U6.1 TrueNAS update that became available recently, and am happy to report that the entire process happened automatically this time, with no intervention needed to get beyond the "system halted" error. I feel fairly confident that updating the other boot sequences in the BIOS has remedied this issue (although, again, it is debatable if there is a bug with either the BIOS or FreeNAS causing either the "Automatic" or "Error" sequence to now be invoked), but will continue to monitor. If I get through the next (u7) significant update, I'll feel even more confident.

 

[DrLove73]

I encountered issue with booting when one of the USB boot drives malfunctions. Boot starts then after "ZFS found following drives" comes:

ZFS i/o error - all block coples unavailable
ZFS can't read MOS of pool freenas-boot
ZFS i/o error - all block coples unavailable
ZFS can't read MOS of pool freenas-boot

and screen goes black, cursor runs arround the screen and then either UEFI is shown or "This is a FreeNAS data disk and can not boot system".
So it CAN be TrueNAS issue, giving up and reverting control to UEFI.

 

[jgreco]

So it CAN be TrueNAS issue, giving up and reverting control to UEFI.

I can't see a device failure resulting in all copies of the data becoming available as being a "TrueNAS issue". That's a "buy a better class of hardware" issue. Computers aren't magic.

 

[NugentS]

"Computers aren't magic"

Malign form of Alien intelligence that have taklen over the world