Trying to reinstall Windows: can't boot (grub rescue)

[John McC]

I have tried and repeatedly failed to get FreeNAS 9.2 working on an old pc. I (eventually) had it booting from a USB memory stick, but couldn't configure working Windows (CIFS) shares to be usable from my Windows network, and have given up trying - it's too difficult without useful starter documentation. I followed all the available documentation, and still can't get things to work, even though I understand Linux permissions.

Now I'm trying to revert the machine to Windows 7 Home Premium.

I have replaced the hard disks I had for FreeNAS with an 80GB SATA device, on SATA1.

I have changed the boot sequence to boot first from DVD RAM drive containing an original Windows 7 Home Premium bit install disk.

When I boot, I first get a message
"Press any key to boot from CD or DVD...."
but pressing any key does nothing, and eventually I get an error message:

error: no such device: bef5669e-9528-4d16-b18c-81aa56f0745d
grub rescue>

Why is Grub still trying to load anyway?

How can I recover from this, please, and get the machine usable again as a Windows PC?

John McC

 

[DrKK]

We could do without the "...without useful starting documentation". I'm not sure that saying our documentation is shit is the best way to get us to pay attention to you, nor am I sure how pointing out that you found the documentation to be insufficient in any way adds to your query.

The fact is, sir, hundreds of thousands of people find the documentation for setting up FreeNAS to be sufficient.

Now, in answer to your question, exactly 1.5 seconds with Google provided over 1000 posts on how to uninstall GRUB in a situation like yours. I provide one link for your convenience, though I am not sure why you made it necessary for one of us to do that for you.

http://askubuntu.com/questions/1512...stem-after-uninstalling-ubuntu-from-windows-7

 

[John McC]

Thank you for your response. I am sorry to have caused offence with my remarks, which I realize now were not tactfully worded. Please accept my apologies.

And thank you for the link. I had already used Google, but found no useful links, as at the time I couldn't get my machine to boot from DVD which all the posts I found assumed you could do.

But I have become enraged with frustration trying to get FreeNAS to work for me. I DO understand Linux/Unix permissions both in outline and in practice, and have managed half a dozen Linux servers over the years, but I have failed after hours of trying to get working more than one simple windows share on FreeNAS, or to get Plex Media Server configured.

It's not that the forum isn't helpful, and the people supportive. They are, and you have been, in spite of your justifiable irritation with me. I am grateful for your help.

But I would have liked even ONE simple example in the documentation of how to set up home directories. I can easily get a homes folder by checking the box in the CIFS setup dialogue, but users don't automatically get a folder in it, and I couldn't see how to create one successfully manually that I could see from Windows, even after setting all the permissions wide open (Owner, Group and Other all with read, write and execute permission). And I did remember to restart the CIFS service after making changes to the configuration.

Perhaps there could be some Get Started Wizard for a home user, that would guide the user to set up home directories with appropriate permissions for each user on a Windows machine, a guest account, a media folder with sub folders for music, photos, videos, and movies, and a media server like Plex.

That's all I was trying to do. I gave up. It's just too difficult. And I say that as a PhD - I'm not stupid, and I'm not inexperienced in using computers. I co-designed one with Stephen Hawking at school, in the 1950s, and have been an advanced user ever since the start of home computing. But I'm not a professional.

I did read the instructions, and I failed to get what I wanted to work. They are very good at telling you HOW to do things, but not WHAT to do, a problem I have found with the majority of documentation written by technically expert people. And for the most part, HOW to do it is pretty straightforward - once you know WHAT to do.

Please accept this as constructive feedback, not criticism. I greatly admire the whole open source movement, and what you are doing. I'm a small contributor to it myself.

I used earlier v0.7 FreeNAS with considerable success. But I wanted to try the latest version, which now seems targetted at corporate enterprises with high performance demands.

I am quite sure that for experienced Sysadmins the documentation is quite adequate. But computer magazines continue to recommend FreeNAS for home users, and I think the current version and its accompanying documentation is almost totally unsuited to that type of user. It's too difficult to get started. And judging from several of the forum posts, I'm not alone in finding this.

Most recently, PC Pro magazine has just published a review of NAS devices for home use. They recommend FreeNAS as a cheap alternative, but warn (not nearly strongly enough in my view) that it is technically difficult. They also said they used ZFS on a machine with 2GB memory. The forum warns strongly against that, saying it is unreliable with less than 8GB. So that's a potential trap for the unwary home user too.

Best wishes

John McC

 

[DrKK]

Unfortunately, the number of articles, podcasts, videos on youtube, forum posts on pseudo-expert forums, and what not, which a bunch of melonheads telling you how great (and even, easy) it is to use FreeNAS on old, deprecated, crappy hardware is too numerous to really comprehend the gestalt of it. I think all of us cringe when we see it. Already, you have noted many contradictions between what experts on THIS forum are saying about hardware requirements, versus what you see on some happy-Linux-hacker's video podcast.

There is no doubt as to why users like you are somewhat surprised to find, when they try it, that FreeNAS is a hard-core, enterprise-grade NAS for server-level equipment, intended to be administered by an actual professional, or uber-power user that really understands things, and preferably has some understanding of BSD instead of Linux. That being said, it only takes a month or so of hard-core study for a very capable person to get up to speed enough that one is competent with something like FreeNAS administration, even if they've never used FreeBSD before. I don't need to tell you there's a lot of people out there who just aren't up to this, and/or don't have the time for it, and were led to believe that they'd be up and running in short order by some misguided forum post on arstechnica or whatever.

There are other projects out there that serve a NAS function, albeit not as nicely, that perform better on lesser hardware and on people who aren't in the business of dealing with something like FreeNAS.

Anyway, good luck, I am sure you will find that you can easily de-grub that drive.

 

[John McC]

All of that is true.

But I'm not using 'old crappy hardware' - it is five years old, but it is on the approved hardware list, and has 4GB memory (it won't take any more, otherwise I'd have added it and used ZFS).

All I'm suggesting is that you could, if you chose, make it more accessible to home users too - otherwise, they will try it, like me, and think poorly of it as a result (because it isn't made apparent at all quickly that it isn't for them).

And I had the further frustration of first ALMOST getting it to work, on a un-branded USB memory stick. FreeNAS couldn't (I think) write to it reliably. After I bought a new Lexmark one, it started working properly, but still not usably for this user. At least (after my posting about my experience) there's a warning now about using only high quality USB memory. That was another few days wasted that could have been avoided had that warning been there in the documentation when I started last December.

Anyway, best of luck with FreeNAS for the future. I really DID want it to work, but haven't any more time to spend on it - let alone a month of full time study!

If you and your colleagues ever do write a starter guide or even a wizard for home users, I'd happily give it another go.

 

[pirateghost]

That's odd. When I first tried freenas a couple of years ago, I had no issues creating shares.

Sent from my Nexus 5

 

[John McC]

I had no issue creating shares. I just couldn't see how to set ownership and permissions right to see them, and read/write to/from Windows, either as a logged in user or guest. Sometimes even after I'd created them, they wouldn't even show up in the FreeNAS folder tree when you get to choose a folder to share. I gave up, baffled. I got a single basic share to work with wide open permissions, but not multiple ones for different purposes for different users.

If you know of a howto for doing what I wanted - a homes/user share(private to each user) for each Windows user to use for documents backup, and the centralized backup plugin to put the backups there; and a public folder for media, with subfolders for music, photos, videos and movies, using Plex Media Server, I'd be willing to do a factory reset and start over. If there is such a guide, I haven't found it, either in the FreeNAS documentation or elsewhere. I must admit I haven't tried hard outside the documentation, where I hoped it would be. Ive seen several that stop at the point where there's one working guest share but not the fuller guide that I wanted.

But that's off topic for this thread, and maybe deserves another post - but not from me.

 

[pirateghost]

There is a how to thread here somewhere that is a dummy guide to permissions...

Sent from my Nexus 5

 

[cyberjock]

[quote="John McC, post: 100092, member: 36253"
But I'm not using 'old crappy hardware' - it is five years old, but it is on the approved hardware list, and has 4GB memory (it won't take any more, otherwise I'd have added it and used ZFS).
[/quote]

I'm sorry, but if you are calling a system with 4GB of RAM not "old crappy hardware" I'll have to disagree with you. I have a 5+ year old system, and I can put up to 48GB of RAM in it. It's not server grade. It's a Nahelem based system(bought November 2008 on the day it was released) and I can put 8GB sticks in it with no problem. I can(and have) put a Xeon on the board and do run it with ECC RAM now(and it even was my FreeNAS server for 8 months). But even my 2007 laptop has 8GB of RAM.

So I'm sorry, but whatever your hardware consists of that is limited to 4GB of RAM, it is clearly old and clearly crappy in my definition of old and crappy in relation to FreeNAS. I really find 5 year old hardware that is limited to 4GB of RAM to be either very poor quality hardware, or far older than you are realizing. The last time I bought a system that was limited to 4GB of RAM was probably 2005 or so.