Trouble rebuilding USB boot disks

[pincorrect]

I have a FreeNAS 9.10 system. I actually want to upgrade it to 11.2 this week, but before I do, I need to fix an issue with my boot drives, which are 32gb USB drives (Samsung). I have two mirrored drives. But I noticed that one of them became defective, and so my boot array status shows as "Degraded". I bought 2 new 64gb USB drives (Sandisk this time). First, I removed the bad 32gb drive and plugged in one of the two new drives, and rebooted FreeNAS. Then I went to the Web interface, and to the System|Boot section and brought up the Status. It showed a long number code for the removed drive (instead of the device name) with the status "UNAVAIL". I hit the "Replace" button at the bottom, and it offered one device choice for the new 64gb drive. I proceeded to build that drive. Then it showed me 3 drives in the Status display, my good 32gb drive, the new drive, and the old, removed, 32gd drive with status "UNAVAIL". I selected that one and hit the "Detach" button. Now the status of my 2 drive array was good ("ONLINE"), and consisted of my old, still working 32gb drive, and one new 64gb drive. To be sure, I rebooted FreeNAS, and it was fine.

However I had purchased 2 new 64gb drives because I wanted to have identical boot drives. So I pulled out the old 32gb drive, plugged in my second new 64gb drive, and followed a procedure similar to the one about to copy the boot image onto it from the first new 64gb drive, and to remove the old 32gb drive from the array. In the end, the two new drives were in, and the status show everything was good ("ONLINE").

So I rebooted again. But I did not get very far. It displayed "Reboot and Select proper Boot Device or Insert Boot Media and press a key.". So it will not boot with my new 64gb drives. I removed both, reinserted my one good 32gb drive, and rebooted. Now I am back to square one, with a degraded array having one good drive (the old 32gb drive).

What did I do wrong? How do I migrate my one good boot image to the 2 new 64gb drives?

 

[sretalla]

I think you need to look into your BIOS settings and select the 64GB sticks specifically.

You should be able to just shut down, take out the 32GB, put in the 64GBs and boot to BIOS, select the sticks and boot.

 

[pincorrect]

Ah, that makes sense. But may I check on one thing? When I went to my bios (It's a Supermicro single Xeon X9xxx with the AMI bios), I have a wide variety of USB devices in the boot list. First of all, I have UEFI and legacy versions of each of them. (E.g. "UEFI USB Drive", "USB Drive", etc.) So my first question is, when the 9.10 installer created my boot pool during the installation, did it create UEFI or legacy bootable drives? Maybe I can take half of them off the boot list, either the UEFI or the legacy ones, to simplify matters.

Second question, in addition to "USB Drives" on the boot list, I have "USB Keys". What's a USB Key, and how is it different than a USB Drive?

I think your suggestion is great, and to make it as straightforward as possible, I think I should just put the USB drives on the boot list, plus maybe the CDROM at the end for running installations.

 

[sretalla]

Without being able to answer for each of the devices specifically, there are many ways that USB key manufacturers and Motherboard manufacturers can present the different kinds of controllers that USB keys use and there's no single standard for how it should work. Some present themselves as floppy drives, others as hard disks, others as USB disks... you'll have to use the information in front of you as presented by the BIOS and decide.

The default for FreeNAS is BIOS, not UEFI (and UEFI can be hard to get to work), so my guess is unless you already know that it was UEFI, it's not.

Hope that helps.

 

[pincorrect]

Sure does. I figured it would good to eliminate the unneeded boot options.

The other route I might have taken would have been to save my config, which I back up anyway, mount the 2 new USB drives and the original 9.10 installation iso (via IPMI), install 9.10 on the new USB drives, creating a 2 drive pool, then upload the saved config to it. But I wanted to try out the mirrored disk rebuild method.

I'll see if fixing the boot list makes that work.

Many thanks for your help!

 

[sretalla]

The other route I might have taken would have been to save my config, which I back up anyway, mount the 2 new USB drives and the original 9.10 installation iso (via IPMI), install 9.10 on the new USB drives, creating a 2 drive pool, then upload the saved config to it

That would have worked too.

 

[tfran1990]

I had the sort of the same issue. except i could not get the 3rd(removed) usb with the string of numbers to actually go away. When trying to get it to boot after that it would get the the EFI shell and not go any further. All of the problems happen after an update. my problem was when i went from 10.x to 11.1

You might run into more problems/dead usb when updating

 

[pschatz100]

Ah, that makes sense. But may I check on one thing? When I went to my bios (It's a Supermicro single Xeon X9xxx with the AMI bios), I have a wide variety of USB devices in the boot list. First of all, I have UEFI and legacy versions of each of them. (E.g. "UEFI USB Drive", "USB Drive", etc.) So my first question is, when the 9.10 installer created my boot pool during the installation, did it create UEFI or legacy bootable drives? Maybe I can take half of them off the boot list, either the UEFI or the legacy ones, to simplify matters.

When you created the USB boot drive, did you not have the option to create either a "legacy" boot drive or a UEFI boot drive? You have to select the one in your bios settings that matches what you did when you created the boot drive.

As has been mentioned previously, for the most part, Supermicro X9 boards prefer that boot devices be set up for bios boot. Yes, there are some devices that can be set up as UEFI boot but this doesn't always work. At the end of the day, the key is that you have to boot off the device that matches how you set up the boot device.

 

[pincorrect]

Sorry I typed my MB model name by memory and I was off because it’s a couple years old. It’s an X11SSH. I created the original usb boot drives as UEFI. I checked and the rebuild option created GPT partitions on my new USB drives, but they wouldn’t boot.

I reduced the boot list to two entries, a USB UEFI drive and a UEFI CD drive, and made sure the USB drive boot menu listed the two USB drives. But it still wouldn’t boot.

Finally I just mounted the ISO as a virtual CD and installed 9.10 on the two new USB drives and then uploaded my saved configuration. That worked fine. But it would have been nice to get the mirrored pool rebuild feature to work.

Anyway now that I have two good boot drives, I’m ready to upgrade to 11.2.