Unable to install! Various versions & media attempted, etc.

kickbucket

Cadet
Joined
Dec 6, 2021
Messages
4
Hello all. I've spent the last few days reading and searching and struggling. I've got an old desktop from 2012 that I'd like to turn into a NAS.

OS: Windows 7 64bit Home
Motherboard: Gateway (Acer) IPISB-VR (rev. 1.01)
Processor: Intel Core i5-2320
RAM: 8GB

Each time I'm using a USB stick prepared with either Rufus or balenaEtcher. I've tried various USB makes/models. I tried to update my BIOS, which I had read could be a problem, but unfortunately that went nowhere. Apparently my motherboard is notorious for this. Googling "Gateway DX4860" will get you many, many users trying to update their BIOS and all receive the "size does not match" error when using Gateway's ROMs. No one seems to have solved this. I'm hoping the BIOS isn't the issue here...

FreeNAS-11.1-U7/FreeNAS-11.1-U6
Seems to go through a variety of lines reading system hardware details, ends with
acpi0: <ACRSYS ACRPRDCT> on motherboard
Then hangs, no change if left alone, fans go up to full speed & sounds like a plane taking off. Have to hard reset to power down.

FreeNAS-11.2-U7
Turned the USB stick into an Instant BSOD Machine. Pitched it.

TrueNAS-12.0-U6.1
Loading kernel... /boot/kernel/kernel text=0x1656de4 data=0x140 data=0xa137b0 syms=[0x8+0x1a4210+0x8+0x1f7e0a] Loading configured modules... can't find '/boot/entropy' can't find '/etc/hostid' can't find 'openzfs' Start 0 0xffffffff80378000 ... EFI framebuffer information: addr, size 0xd1000000, 0x1000000 dimensions 800 x 600 stride 800 masks 0x00ff0000, 0x0000ff00, 0x000000ff, 0xff000000
Then hangs. I left it for over an hour with no change. The PC was quiet and powered off with a simple press of the power button, no hard reset required.

What's going on here? I'm stumped.
 

NugentS

MVP
Joined
Apr 16, 2020
Messages
2,945
You don't seem to have any disks to put Free/True NAS on
 

NugentS

MVP
Joined
Apr 16, 2020
Messages
2,945
Your kit list had no list of any disks - how were we to know whats actually there?
Flash / Thumb drives are not recommended (thats not to say they won't work, for a while at least)

My read of this is (like yours) probably BIOS issues.
Memory is low - but is at the mimimum. CPU is OK
Have you tested the memory properly (overnight on continuous memtest)?

With 12.0-U6.1 do you actually get to install TN or is this just booting the installer USB and before getting to select the disk to install on?
 

kickbucket

Cadet
Joined
Dec 6, 2021
Messages
4
Your kit list had no list of any disks - how were we to know whats actually there?
Flash / Thumb drives are not recommended (thats not to say they won't work, for a while at least)
Gee, my mistake, should I also tell you I have a keyboard plugged in and that pressing the keys isn't my problem?

There's also a 1TB internal HDD available but I'm not even getting to the stage where I can select where I would like to install Free/TrueNAS.

My read of this is (like yours) probably BIOS issues.
Memory is low - but is at the mimimum. CPU is OK
Have you tested the memory properly (overnight on continuous memtest)?

I have not, I had not seen suggestion of this previously. I'll look into it, thanks.

With 12.0-U6.1 do you actually get to install TN or is this just booting the installer USB and before getting to select the disk to install on?
This is before anything has happened other than pressing "enter" (or waiting for it to timeout and boot itself)
 

jgreco

Resident Grinch
Joined
May 29, 2011
Messages
18,681
Gee, my mistake, should I also tell you I have a keyboard plugged in and that pressing the keys isn't my problem?

We've had that exact problem within the last week, so, yes, that's not out of scope.

<moderator hat on>
Kindly try to understand that this is a community forum, and that the people here are not paid iXsystems support staff, but rather they are community participants taking time out of their days to help you out. You can get the most out of these forums by volunteering the necessary information to help forum members analyze and respond to your messages. If you do not provide useful information, you can expect that either you will be called upon to provide such information, or you will receive low quality responses (or no responses). Your experience here will be smoothest when your starting position is to assume other people are trying to be helpful.
</moderator hat>
 

kickbucket

Cadet
Joined
Dec 6, 2021
Messages
4
We've had that exact problem within the last week, so, yes, that's not out of scope.

<moderator hat on>
Kindly try to understand that this is a community forum, and that the people here are not paid iXsystems support staff, but rather they are community participants taking time out of their days to help you out. You can get the most out of these forums by volunteering the necessary information to help forum members analyze and respond to your messages. If you do not provide useful information, you can expect that either you will be called upon to provide such information, or you will receive low quality responses (or no responses). Your experience here will be smoothest when your starting position is to assume other people are trying to be helpful.
</moderator hat>

I'm quite aware of this and consider myself pretty understanding, having participated in many forums of the years. I try to do as much due diligence as possible before asking for help and I never expect someone to solve my problems for me.

In my years on forums I've also come across many, many users who do "help" but not without leaving aside a certain contempt for the lowly noobs asking for help.

Perhaps I was mistaken in how I read NugentA's response above but they asked about an installation drive and I answered, providing more information & inquiring if there was something in the code I had posted that suggested the installer wasn't recognizing the media I was using. The response I received - and again, perhaps I'm misreading the tone - seemed unnecessarily rude. I didn't think my joking response was going to get me a "mod talk."
 

jgreco

Resident Grinch
Joined
May 29, 2011
Messages
18,681
perhaps I'm misreading the tone - seemed unnecessarily rude. I didn't think my joking response was going to get me a "mod talk."

Tone is something that is often stripped in the ASCII-ification of forum posts, and it becomes easy to read into things tone that wasn't intended. It wasn't particularly clear that your own tone was joking, I find it difficult to read with such tone, but it is fine if so. It is a common problem for new users to show up here and for them to take offense at the lack of omniscience of posters who are trying to help them, or that they're being expected to provide (gasp!) details (gasp!) about their system, when we here should all just know the obvious answers to their common problem because FreeNAS is such sucky software and obviously everyone has had their exact problem in the past too. See, now, you can read what I wrote in several tones, and it could come off poorly, or as I mean it, which is to help illustrate the tone issue while also providing a little more background on what it's like to be on the other side of this all.

In general, we're very good at sorting out basic issues people are having, but I do strongly recommend following the forum equivalent of Postel's law ... be conservative in what you write, and liberal in what you accept. People participate here because they want to be helpful, after all. If we all assume that the goal is to make everyone's FreeNAS experience better, then it isn't such a problem if English isn't someone's first language, or if their social skills aren't great, or if they simply wrote something that they didn't anticipate being taken poorly on the recipient's side.
 
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