SOLVED Upgraded to 9.10 u2 and now it will not boot

[grooveman]

Hello.

I was happily using Freenas 9.10. Then, last week, I noticed that I had some updates available. So, I applied them. Ever since then, I have not been able to boot. I get that same old familiar error "this is a nas data disk and cannot boot..." But WAIT! before you tune out and assume I don't have my Bios set correctly, please read on.

I do have the BIOS set up correctly, it is absolutely the first drive in the boot sequence. When I remove all other drives (either in the boot sequence or even by physically disconnecting them), I get the error: "Reboot and select proper boot device or insert Boot media in selected boot device and press a key".

Since this problem manifested, I have tried about a dozen upgrades, then finally gave up, and tried about 2 dozen installs of 9.10 - 9.10 u2. None of them will boot. The system doesn't even acknowledge the drive as bootable for some reason. I should also say that I don't get one iota of error output on any of my reinstall attempts. The install process seems to go without a hitch.

A little more weirdness: When I hit f11 to get my boot options, I see I have two entries for the boot disk, one is UEFI, and the other doesn't say anything special, so MBR maybe? In any event, if I select the UEFI option, GRUB does come up. But no matter what option I choose, it just takes me to a black screen.

Just to be certain there is nothing wrong with the disk, I have wiped it by writing zeros to it, and I have installed Knoppix on it (which boots with no problems whatsoever in the same system). It is definitely good. It is, after all, only 6 months old. I have also tried installing 9.10 u2 to a usb stick. Grub installs, but no matter what option I choose, all I get is a black screen.

A little bit about my system:

My boot device: Samsung 128Gig 850 pro SSD
My motherboard: SuperMicro X9SRL-F
Memory: 32GB
CPU: Intex Xeon E5-2650

For the record: This was working fine for at least 6 months with the EXACT same configuration.

I switched to an SSD about 6 months ago because I was tired of having USB sticks blow-out on me. I went through 3 in about an 8 month period. I know it is a waste of space (and $) to use an SSD for my boot device... but it has a 10 year warranty, and I really didn't want to wind up in this position again, so I splurged (yet here I am just the same!) :)

Thanks for your help.

G

 

[BigDave]

At this point, I would recommend a different SSD drive to install to. Take your pool drives out of
the picture, try the SSD in a a different data port/with a different power plug...

A little bit about my system:

My boot device: Samsung 128Gig 850 pro SSD
My motherboard: SuperMicro X9SRL-F
Memory: 32GB
CPU: Intex Xeon E5-2650

OR try giving more specifics

 

[SweetAndLow]

What was the previous version you were running?

Sent from my Nexus 5X using Tapatalk

 

[grooveman]

BigDave, I have already tried this. It didn't help. Also, I have proved that the drive is good by installing knoppix on it. Works fine. It is only Freenas that seems to have the problem. What other kind of details would you be interested in? I have stripped all drives out of the system, so all there is: motherboard, drive, memory, cpu.. not much left.

Sweet'Nasty, my previous version was 9.10 stable. I think I initially installed some variant of 9.3, and upgraded to 9.10. It worked fine... but now, I cannot even install plain ol' 9.10.

Thanks again.

G

 

[BigDave]

BigDave, I have already tried this. It didn't help. Also, I have proved that the drive is good by installing knoppix on it. Works fine. It is only Freenas that seems to have the problem. What other kind of details would you be interested in? I have stripped all drives out of the system, so all there is: motherboard, drive, memory, cpu.. not much left.

For the sake of argument I will assume the multiple attempts of a fresh install to this hardware was a hash verified download.
If this was not the case and the install media was unchanged and using the same downloaded file, I would start there first.
If that reveals no answers, I would look at the motherboard next.

 

[grooveman]

Hi again.

Ok. Yes, I actually tried with three different disks... Very strange. I downloaded a fresh copy again and decided to start all over. Again.

What I"m wondering is that if somewhere between my initial install of FreeNAS and this update, they changed from MBR to UEFI... Because once I forced UEFI, after reinstalling again, I was able to get it to boot. All I did was update from 9.10 to 9.10.1 u2... I didn't mess with bios settings.

My motherboard was playing games with me. A strange bug in the bios that resets the UEFI BBS options back to the onboard EFI settings after a failed boot, which pushes the UEFI OS last in the sequence (behind two on-board UEFI environments). It must have done this to me 100 times before I noticed. I had about given up. I must have found some magical combination. I'm not sure why it is booting now, however, last time I forced UEFI down its throat (from the bios boot menu) it just went to a black screen. Now it works. Whatever my settings used to be FreeNAS had no problem with it. Now, it seems to want only UEFI.

The other strange thing is that I had backed up the config right before all this started... but the config would not load. Failed about half a dozen times in a row. That was a backup from a 9.10 version of the system. I located an older, 9.3 backup, uploaded that, and it seemed to work. Very strange.

At least it is working now... My thanks to you both for your input.

-G

 

[Ericloewe]

they changed from MBR to UEFI

You're mixing completely different things. FreeNAS has used GPT instead of MBR for the boot devices since 9.3 and all semi-modern BIOSes boot that.

More recently, support for booting in UEFI mode instead of legacy BIOS has been added - this is optional.