Upgrade from 9.3 -> 11.1 gone wrong

[Tyrith]

Feels like it's been nearly 2 years with 0 issues! Pretty happy with that performance, but I've run in to some very strange issues due to a drive failure a few weeks ago. I received an e-mail letting me know a drive was acting up, and it turns out the second last non-failed 3TB in my 5x3TB Seagate Array has gone bad. Several years out of warranty, and I was pleased to see (in terms of notification) an e-mail notifying me. After some fiddling, I figured out which one it was and popped in a 4TB WD Red that I had picked up a few years ago to use as a replacement.

Re-silvered easily, and when all was said and done -- it worked! And then the bad part -- It told me there were 'upgrades' available, something I had never seen/noticed before. I figured since I was doing work, I might as well do everything available.

I went ahead and went through the upgrade process from 9.3 -> 11.1, which also seemed to work and was fairly easy to follow, and at that point everything appeared to be working fine and migrated over without issue -- Until I shut it off and it hasn't worked since!

It's a Jetway NF99FL-525 w/Corsair 430W PSU. Temperatures are decent, BIOS loads up fine, and the system makes it to intro for FreeNAS loads up on the various USB's I've tried. I've tried several USB's, A lone BIOS update, and even several different versions (9.3 / 11.1 U1, U5 / 10) of FreeNAS unsuccessfully to make it past the boot screen. I've also tried booting with and without drives plugged in with 0 success.

Anytime I've made it past the opening loading screens (ie the upgrade/install FreeNAS screen on each of the USB's), it just seems to lock up. No linux information, no loading stuff, zilch. It appears to be hard-locking as soon as you get close to booting it. Forever stuck here (FreeNAS v10, 9.3 / 11.1U1, 11.1U5 don't appear to have this message, but locks in the same area with no information given):

Anyone able to suggest any sort of troubleshooting that might help get this thing bootable again, or at least pave the way to being able to access the data again? I'm thinking it might not be possible since I can't even get the 9.3 it was running for years bootable even with no drives on it.

 

[Tyrith]

I did a little more hardware testing as I found more than one version (9.3 and 11.1U1) to lock up before you're allowed to pick which version to boot to, which never happened before.

Memtest86 comes back clean on a 6 hour pass. Short of hooking up a different OS to test the mobo/PSU, I'm out of ideas on this one and suspect that's where the issue lies. Any easier ideas than manually wiring 5 drives up to an alternate PC with FreeBSD (or a FreeNAS boot) to give em a whirl?

 

[DrKK]

That motherboard is definitely not my first choice, either in terms of age or design, for a FreeNAS...but OK. Let's see where we are.

One thing you might try is to disconnect all of the data drives entirely, and just boot the FreeNAS up with a fresh, brand new, install of FreeNAS and no pool.

If that works, we can suspect some issue with the drives, ports, or connections. If that does NOT work, we then begin to suspect something more fundamental to the hardware.

 

[Tyrith]

Yeah, I figured that was the case in terms of hardware! I was getting stuck with the booting w/no Pool, which is what lead me to start doing stuff like Memtest86.

I'll see about hooking up my other power supply to the ancient motherboard, and if not -- see what the Drives hooked up to my main PC brings. Assuming a hardware fault somewhere, I suspect that should shed some more focused light on the problem. Thanks for the advice and good to know that I was most likely on the right track :)