Unable to boot or install after an upgrade of 11.1 to 11.2

[ovizii]

I'm not sure this is the right forum to ask but I have a HP Microserver N54L Gen6 which ran just fine until yesterday with 11.1 (Latest update).
I then updated it to 11.2 which worked flawless, even my encrypted pool worked perfectly after I entered the password. I then started installing the new plugins, deleting the old ones via the legacy UI, did a reboot and my server did not come up again. Everything was perfect. I then had a look and it just hangs there after trying to start from the USB stick (2 of them where its installed) no error nothing just a blinking cursor.

So I decided to start with a fresh install of 11.2, prepared the media according to the manual but when starting from it it gets as far as the bootstrap loader, Revision 1.1 and then just stops there.

The only simialr thread I coudl find is this one: https://forums.freebsd.org/threads/installer-hangs-during-boot-11-1-on-amd.61936/ and a possibly related bug https://bugs.freebsd.org/bugzilla/show_bug.cgi?id=221350

I tried both USB sticks which were in use and no luck :-( If I don't get any tips I guess I'll have to finally update to a newer system but this was working just fine since 2014 :-(

 

[Redcoat]

My first suspect would be corrupt USB boot drive(s). I would get a couple more new USB drives, make a fresh install on one of them and try it.

 

[ovizii]

My first suspect would be corrupt USB boot drive(s). I would get a couple more new USB drives, make a fresh install on one of them and try it.

Thanks. I got bogged down with other issues but will give it a try and try some new USB drives.

 

[Apollo]

I would go SSD if I were you. Much less issues in general and better resiliancy overall.

11.2 seems to be less forgiving than its previous release in term of hardware. There seems to be more issues and also what might seem as a failure to boot, may just be cause for a longer delay.
With encrypted pool, when you reboot, you will still need to unlock it and this is going to cause Freenas to scan the pool.
It is not unheard of than upon unlocking you can spend 30 minutes waiting for the process to complete. It is of course HW dependant and the number of snapshots available on the pool/pools.

One thing you can try is testing your system without you encrypted pool attached to it.
Start a brand new install and if you have a spare disk around I would look at creating a brand new pool without encryption.
If you can manage booting from cold and rebooting many time, or at least show you can boot at least once, then that should help you narrow down some of the issue.

At least if you can boot with a fresh install, this will prove your system is capable up to that point. Then you can focus at sorting out what are the possible cause for failure.

 

[ovizii]

THX for the advice. I finally got around to try again and using the very same USB sticks involved I successfully installed 11.1 U7

The current problem is that it takes forever to reach the web GUI. I then login and when I want to go to System => General to import my old backed up config the screen simply times out. Can someone please tell me how I can do this import via CLI as I can reach the NAS very easily via CLI.

It might also be a problem of my browser redirecting to HTTPS while the default install has only HTTP enabled? Can I change this via CLI somehow? I just need HTTPS once, to import my old config.