USB Install Problem

[xiSlickix]

Supermicro X9SCL-F - Intel i3 - 32GB ECC RAM - 6 2TB WD Blacks

I've been mounting a 9.2.1.3-x64 ISO over IPMI. Boots all the way to the picture attached, and shows my 8GB Adata S102 PRO as a 512 Byte disk, and will not install due to the drive supposedly not having enough space. I purchased two of these drives, so I already swapped them out and the same error applies. Any thoughts on this would be super helpful.

-I have tried dd-ing the USB .img file, but I get a corrupted error each time. Hoping I didn't get two bad flash drives, but at this point I'm really scratching my head.

 

[cyberjock]

It's possible to damage your USB stick with writing the image. So you may have damaged them with the dd of the image, but it's pretty unlikely. It sounds like either you have 2 bad sticks or something else is wrong. Maybe one of your USB ports is bad and it damaged both sticks? I think it's pretty unlikely that one person would get 2 bad USB sticks.

 

[xiSlickix]

Maybe one of your USB ports is bad and it damaged both sticks? I think it's pretty unlikely that one person would get 2 bad USB sticks.

I've been able to liveboot Parted Magic (on the would be FreeNAS hardware), reformat the flash drive, delete all the partitions and reformat, and write zero's to the entire disk, and redo the MBR in a BSD format. I'm really grasping at what the hell its doing to me.

 

[xiSlickix]

-I have tried dd-ing the USB .img file, but I get a corrupted error each time. Hoping I didn't get two bad flash drives, but at this point I'm really scratching my head.

Also, I did a terrible job explaining that. the dd of the image finishes fine, and gives no indication that anything is wrong.
I get a filesystem corrupt error when FreeNAS tried to boot from said USB stick. I can post a screen shot if anyone wants to see it.

 

[xiSlickix]

Ok, I get this isn't a hard ware forum, but this makes no damn sense. Live Boot to PartedMagic - GParted sees dev/sdh (aka - da0) as a 7.42GiB disk. (sda - sdf are my WD Hard Drives) I recognize that in BSD booting up, it distinguished between the Hard Disks (ada#) and the Flash Drive (da#). If I recall, does "ad" prefix indicate IDE / SATA disks, where as the "da" prefix indicates SCSI disks? Would this possibly through a monkey wrench into the mix?

Also, GParted sees that flash drive as its appropriate size, while its sitting in the same USB port, live booted from the same box. That same flash drive, once formatted, shows up in Windows fine as well, on another computer. I copied a 4 GB iso file to it to make sure it still writes. This makes me feel like the drive isn't bad. Is there any particular formatting that I can do to the drive that might make it more BSD friendly?

 

[xiSlickix]

Well, I have absolutely NO IDEA why, but both of those Adata S102 PRO's appear to not be friendly with BSD. I tried a Kingston (Traveler ?) (DT 100 G2 PMAP) 8GB flash drive, and FreeNAS sees it a 7.5 GB - I'll be using that one.

I would steer clear of the Adata's for the purpose of FreeNAS. I have absolutely no idea why it behaved this way. The Adata's are otherwise very reliable flash drives. I've used others of this exact same make and model for a year and a half without a single issue before this.

--Off to getting this thing up and running.

 

[cyberjock]

Yeah.. Adata isn't what I'd call a "name brand" as discussed in the manual. So I'm not too terribly surprised. But, the fact they show up as 512 bytes in the installer is interesting. Makes for interesting conversation.

 

[xiSlickix]

While Adata isn't as well known as SanDisk, their their products are on a lot of top ten lists for flash drives and SSD's. I chose them not because they were the cheapest flash drives I could find (they definitely were not) but because of their reliability in my experience. I have had SanDisk drives give me errors in the past, and most of their products seem to be either rock solid or utter shit, without much in between. That's also the reasoning behind this server running WD blacks (5 Year Warranty).

So, bad luck on my part.

Sent from my SCH-I535 using Tapatalk

 

[cyberjock]

I agree with you 100%.

I have 3 adata USB sticks. They aren't bad, but I wouldn't call them top tier either. I did use my 32GB adata USB stick for a FreeNAS temp machine. It had nothing but weird problems. As soon as I swapped USB sticks to Corsair the problems were gone.

Sandisk and Kingston is one of those where it either works or it doesn't. I prefer that kind of black and white because it makes troubleshooting easy.

I use Corsair Voyagers in all of the FreeNAS boxes I've built and never had a regret.