Hi
I have been running FreeNAS with no problems since I built my home server back in June this year.
Three days ago I discovered that it was not working. I connected a monitor to the server and found this message:
This is a freenas data disk and cannot boot system.
A long post follows with loads of detail, but first my setup:
HP Proliant ML310e Gen8 v2
16GB DDR3 RAM
4 x Seagate Ironwolf 1TB NAS HDDs
FreeNAS-11.3-U3.2
1 pool, all 4 disks included, configured RAIDZ2
...and a little about me:
Although I now run a property management business in France, most of my working life was spent in the UK in IT, most recently as a network engineer managing Checkpoint, Palo Alto and Cisco firewalls, plus various bits of Cisco LAN kit. Although a relative newbie as far as FreeNAS is concerned, my background is tech ;-)
So, it sounds like my USB boot device (SanDisk something or other, 16GB I think!) has got corrupted, I thought. But why was it trying to reboot anyway…?
************ Possible red herring warning
To check the USB key I put it into my Linux Mint box – which did not recognise that anything had been inserted. Looks like the USB key is toast :-(
To check that the server would boot from a good USB key I put a Linux Mint boot USB key in the server. This booted OK, but did give a couple of strange warnings during the Mint boot process:
TSC_DEADLINE disabled due to Errata: please update microcode to version: 0x22 (or later)
the BIOS has corrupted hw PMU resources MSR 38d is 330
Googling these messages it sounds like they are more Linux-related than FreeBSD, but I flashed the BIOS (same version is still current) just to be sure – it made no difference.
However, I could not reliably boot into Mint – sometimes it went straight to booting off the network interface, despite the boot order being USB then network, and even when I pressed F11 for the boot menu and selected USB boot.
But I did notice a new message appear on those occasions when I could boot Mint:
usb 4-9: device descriptor recd/64 error -110
Google says this is a problem with the amount of power available to the USB port. Investigating the power options in the BIOS, I found the default is ‘Balanced Power and Performance’. I changed it to ‘Maximum Performance’ which disables all power management options.
Since then I have booted reliably into Mint every time.
Perhaps this is something that might have caused the SanDisk USB key to die ??? Who knows.
*********** end of red herring warning.
So, with the apparent booting from USB problems out of the way, I set out to create a new USB boot key for FreeNAS as per the documentation 2.5.5 If Something Goes Wrong:
- Perform a fresh installation on a new boot device
- Import the pools
- Restore the configuration
Creating the installation on the new boot device (just a spare cheap 16GB key I had lying around) went just fine (although it took a long time – I went away after about 45 minutes and left it to finish, which it had by bed time!)
Put the new USB key into the server and booted it up – booted off the new key no problem. But I have a few odd things:
The boot sequence gets stuck at:
Trying to mount root from zfs:freenas-boot/ROOT/default []…
for quite a long time. Eventually it says
lo0: link state changed to UP
Then I get a number of strange messages at various points during the boot process:
MIDDLEWARED FAILED TO START, SYSTEM WILL NOT BEHAVE CORRECTLY
Failed to run middleware call. Daemon not running? (this one reappears several times during the boot sequence)
Configuration file format is too old, syslog-ng is running in compatibility mode…….
Freenas ntpd[822]: error resolving pool 0.freebsd.pool.ntp.org: hostname nor servername provided, or not known (8)
(this may be because our Internet connection is down at the moment – it never rains but it pours, eh!)
I am able to ping the server from my PC, but when I try to connect to the web interface I get the following on the server console:
D*** I didn’t take a picture of the message, and now it’s disappeared off the screen. It was something about connection refused.
I have just tried the web interface again to check on the message and now it has been up for an hour or more the web interface has connected OK! Bizarre, but maybe all these errors are connected somehow…?
So, now I am trying to import the pool. I select Storage – Pools – Add – Import an existing pool – no, it is not encrypted. Under the Pool* prompt the drop-down list of available pools contains just one entry – my pool name is shown here. I click on it and click Next and having confirmed the pool import summary I click on Import. I then get:
Error importing pool
/data/zfs' is not a valid directory
Googling these various error messages there seems to be a common thread, that you need to use a quality USB key for your boot disk. In fact one post suggests not using a USB key, but an M.2 SSD on a USB connection is more reliable.
Am I wasting my time investigating any further, should I just get a new high quality USB key (or an M.2 SSD)? Or is there something else likely to be wrong?
I’d appreciate your thoughts.
Julian
I have been running FreeNAS with no problems since I built my home server back in June this year.
Three days ago I discovered that it was not working. I connected a monitor to the server and found this message:
This is a freenas data disk and cannot boot system.
A long post follows with loads of detail, but first my setup:
HP Proliant ML310e Gen8 v2
16GB DDR3 RAM
4 x Seagate Ironwolf 1TB NAS HDDs
FreeNAS-11.3-U3.2
1 pool, all 4 disks included, configured RAIDZ2
...and a little about me:
Although I now run a property management business in France, most of my working life was spent in the UK in IT, most recently as a network engineer managing Checkpoint, Palo Alto and Cisco firewalls, plus various bits of Cisco LAN kit. Although a relative newbie as far as FreeNAS is concerned, my background is tech ;-)
So, it sounds like my USB boot device (SanDisk something or other, 16GB I think!) has got corrupted, I thought. But why was it trying to reboot anyway…?
************ Possible red herring warning
To check the USB key I put it into my Linux Mint box – which did not recognise that anything had been inserted. Looks like the USB key is toast :-(
To check that the server would boot from a good USB key I put a Linux Mint boot USB key in the server. This booted OK, but did give a couple of strange warnings during the Mint boot process:
TSC_DEADLINE disabled due to Errata: please update microcode to version: 0x22 (or later)
the BIOS has corrupted hw PMU resources MSR 38d is 330
Googling these messages it sounds like they are more Linux-related than FreeBSD, but I flashed the BIOS (same version is still current) just to be sure – it made no difference.
However, I could not reliably boot into Mint – sometimes it went straight to booting off the network interface, despite the boot order being USB then network, and even when I pressed F11 for the boot menu and selected USB boot.
But I did notice a new message appear on those occasions when I could boot Mint:
usb 4-9: device descriptor recd/64 error -110
Google says this is a problem with the amount of power available to the USB port. Investigating the power options in the BIOS, I found the default is ‘Balanced Power and Performance’. I changed it to ‘Maximum Performance’ which disables all power management options.
Since then I have booted reliably into Mint every time.
Perhaps this is something that might have caused the SanDisk USB key to die ??? Who knows.
*********** end of red herring warning.
So, with the apparent booting from USB problems out of the way, I set out to create a new USB boot key for FreeNAS as per the documentation 2.5.5 If Something Goes Wrong:
- Perform a fresh installation on a new boot device
- Import the pools
- Restore the configuration
Creating the installation on the new boot device (just a spare cheap 16GB key I had lying around) went just fine (although it took a long time – I went away after about 45 minutes and left it to finish, which it had by bed time!)
Put the new USB key into the server and booted it up – booted off the new key no problem. But I have a few odd things:
The boot sequence gets stuck at:
Trying to mount root from zfs:freenas-boot/ROOT/default []…
for quite a long time. Eventually it says
lo0: link state changed to UP
Then I get a number of strange messages at various points during the boot process:
MIDDLEWARED FAILED TO START, SYSTEM WILL NOT BEHAVE CORRECTLY
Failed to run middleware call. Daemon not running? (this one reappears several times during the boot sequence)
Configuration file format is too old, syslog-ng is running in compatibility mode…….
Freenas ntpd[822]: error resolving pool 0.freebsd.pool.ntp.org: hostname nor servername provided, or not known (8)
(this may be because our Internet connection is down at the moment – it never rains but it pours, eh!)
I am able to ping the server from my PC, but when I try to connect to the web interface I get the following on the server console:
D*** I didn’t take a picture of the message, and now it’s disappeared off the screen. It was something about connection refused.
I have just tried the web interface again to check on the message and now it has been up for an hour or more the web interface has connected OK! Bizarre, but maybe all these errors are connected somehow…?
So, now I am trying to import the pool. I select Storage – Pools – Add – Import an existing pool – no, it is not encrypted. Under the Pool* prompt the drop-down list of available pools contains just one entry – my pool name is shown here. I click on it and click Next and having confirmed the pool import summary I click on Import. I then get:
Error importing pool
/data/zfs' is not a valid directory
Googling these various error messages there seems to be a common thread, that you need to use a quality USB key for your boot disk. In fact one post suggests not using a USB key, but an M.2 SSD on a USB connection is more reliable.
Am I wasting my time investigating any further, should I just get a new high quality USB key (or an M.2 SSD)? Or is there something else likely to be wrong?
I’d appreciate your thoughts.
Julian
