Unable to boot from (this specific) usb drive as default

[tofagerl]

So I wanted to switch out my CPU this weekend (4-day weekend in Norway due to first religious and then state holiday), and ran into this funny little bug that wants to destroy my sanity.

For some reason, after a lot of back and forth, my motherboard refuses to use the USB drive with FreeNAS installed on it as the default boot device. It'll boot from it manually just fine. It'll select the OTHER USB device, the big proper one I use all the time for other stuff and can't just put into the back of a server and forget, as default.
But not the one it has been using as a boot drive for three years. Nope, never heard of it. Obviously not compatible.

Anyone heard of something like this?

If it turns out I have to buy a new boot-drive for this, does anyone have a brand or model they particularily recommend? USB drives are not my area of expertise, but I imagine Sandisk and Samsung are ok?

 

[danb35]

The Sandisk Cruzer Fit seems to be widely recommended due to its small physical size. Or use a small SSD.

 

[tofagerl]

Actually I used to have a Cruzer fit, but it stopped working. I might try another, if I can find one.

 

[Mirfster]

IMHO SSD (older cheap one ~32GB) is the way to go. Mirrored is even better.

 

[tofagerl]

Turns out the local "gadgets, office supplies, tools and cheap shit" store has the Cruzer Fit on stock, so I'll pick up two tomorrow. One for the OS, one for backup.

SSD is way overkill. You realize that FreeNAS runs from RAM, right?

 

[danb35]

SSD is way overkill. You realize that FreeNAS runs from RAM, right?

Yes, of course we realize that*. We also realize that USB sticks are generally pretty awful in terms of reliability, while SSDs tend to do much better in that regard. Small SSDs are cheap, and much less likely to fail than a USB stick.

* FreeNAS 9.2 and prior loaded the OS into a ramdisk; 9.3 and up do not. The ARC ensures that the bulk of the OS will be in RAM at any given time, but it isn't always loaded into RAM for the duration of the system uptime, as it was with 9.2 and prior.

 

[tofagerl]

Did not know about the ARC. Adaptive replacement caching? Looking it up now...
Anyway, true about SSDs, but in this case I'm all out of SATA ports anyway, so I would have to use an adapter, which makes booting tricky.

If I ever upgrade the NAS I will get an m.2 slot in the mobo, I think. That would make the issue irrelevant :)

 

[tofagerl]

Well, the Cruzer Fit works fine. The Corsair Flash Voyager I used to have there still seems to work fine according to MacOS disk utility's first aid feature, but then I did reformat it to FAT32 since the mac couldn't read the ZFS volume.

So still no idea what the problem was. *shrug*