USB installer stuck before loading menu

[groot opperhoofd]

Hello everyone,

I've been trying to install truenas core on my system but so far I'm stuck even before the installer menu opens. See screenshot about where it gets 'stuck'.
It's not actually unresponsive because I can plug/unplug a USB device and it will still respond to that with some extra lines but it will never get to the setup screen that I'm expecting to see.

I was using one of those SD card adapters as a USB because that was what I had lying around but I've already bought a real usb stick in the hope that that might solve it but without any luck. I've tried Truenas 13 and 12 but they both seem to stop at the same point. "uhub1: 4 ports with 4 removable self powered" is to be the last line for Truenas 13 and for 12 it continues to spit out 5 arc4random lines and then stops altogether.

I've made boot USB drives with balena etcher on MacOS and with rufus on windows but all seem to get stuck at the same point.

Then I started to doubt if my hardware had any defects so I installed Ubuntu but that didn't show any problems at all. Everything seems to work perfectly.

I have the following hardware.

• CPU: i3 12100F
• MoBo: Gigabyte H610I DDR4
• RAM: G.Skill Aegis F4-3000C16D-16GISB
• SSD: Samsung 980 500GB
• HDD: 4x Seagate IronWolf, 6TB

Does anyone has suggestions about what the issue could be or what I could try next?
I'd be happy to provide more information if necessary.

 

[groot opperhoofd]

Ok so I've finally got time to investigate this some more and I found this is not a truenas issue but something that is also present in freeBSD. I've installed a freeBSD image on a USB stick and the bootloader looks identical and I get stuck at the same spot.

Reading through the freeBSD forum I've found the following lead:
https://bugs.freebsd.org/bugzilla/show_bug.cgi?id=264179

Next step is to figure out how to change the config file on an ISO in macOS. My windows workstation currently has no graphics card/PSU because I borrowed that for the display output for the machine I want to run truenas on...

 

[elvisimprsntr]

Have you seen this post

Modify a bootable .iso image (macOS) — ePirat‘s Blog

 

[groot opperhoofd]

Yes I've found that one but for some reason it doesnt work. I've ran through all the steps but the boot.bin file is not picked up or something else goes wrong because balenaetcher doesn't load the image and gives a message that it is missing a partition table.

Any suggestions for windows? I've been trying this with the same result:
https://www.wintips.org/how-to-edit-iso-file-modify-windows-iso-bootable-image/
For some reason the partition table is not easy to copy for Truenas image.

Any options to solve it in the console?I have some control over the system when I load the original truenas image and I press escape in the bootloader but so far I haven't figured out if editing /boot/loader.conf is possible.

 

[groot opperhoofd]

Ok so I'm an idiot. In the bootloader you can set a variable with 'set hint.em.0.disabled=0' to ensure that the NIC doesn't load and type 'boot' for the machine to boot. It does allow me to install truenas now and I've also been able to boot into it and edit the /boot/loader.conf with ee texteditor and add the line so it automatically ignores the NIC at boot. This leaves me with a system without a network controller though which is not really useful for a NAS.

So far it has been a steep learning curve for someone without any BSD experience but I expect the experience will be a lot smoother when I got the truenas network interface working. How is the support for USB to ethernet adapters with truenas? Guess I'll go for a stroll on the forum here.

 

[pschatz100]

Are you saying there is a conflict with your NIC? If that is the case, you might try turning off all of the NIC enhancements in the bios. A usb NIC won't help you - TrueNAS doesn't support it.

Gaming motherboards often have features that are of no value to TrueNAS, so it is best to turn them off. That goes for advanced power saving features as well.

If you cannot get past the hardware conflicts, you might try TrueNAS Scale. Since it is based on Linux, it will support a greater array of hardware.

 

[groot opperhoofd]

Are you saying there is a conflict with your NIC? If that is the case, you might try turning off all of the NIC enhancements in the bios. A usb NIC won't help you - TrueNAS doesn't support it.

Gaming motherboards often have features that are of no value to TrueNAS, so it is best to turn them off. That goes for advanced power saving features as well.

If you cannot get past the hardware conflicts, you might try TrueNAS Scale. Since it is based on Linux, it will support a greater array of hardware.

Thanks for the information!
I kinda started this project without reading up on it enough since I saw everyone just throwing seemingly random computer hardware together and I expected my thing just to work. After doing the reading that I should have done in the first place I understand that it is aimed a lot more at serverhardware and that parts that are several years old are preferred for their proven reliability and bugfree support.

The issue seems to have nothing to do with configuration in the BIOS but rather something specific with the combination of 12th gen core CPUs in combination with the NIC on the motherboard. I did try to find solutions on the BSD forum but that was a dead end since the thread was discontinued. I've also tried a BSD current release in the beta branch but that didn't fix the issue so I'm going to assume that this will not be fixed soon (if ever).

I have a server PCIe NIC on the way that is included in the BSD supported hardware list for BSD13.0 and I hope that will be enough to fix the current issue. Only thing I'm not sure of is if it is picked up directly without configuration because I only have a single PCIe slot and no way to connect both a display and the NIC at the same time (the reason why I opted for USB NIC first but I abandonned the idea since more people on the forum said it was a bad idea). If this will not work I will follow up on your advice to look at TrueNAS Scale.

 

[pschatz100]

Thanks for the information!
I kinda started this project without reading up on it enough since I saw everyone just throwing seemingly random computer hardware together and I expected my thing just to work. After doing the reading that I should have done in the first place I understand that it is aimed a lot more at serverhardware and that parts that are several years old are preferred for their proven reliability and bugfree support.

Yes, TrueNAS is targeted towards server hardware - which is designed for longevity and reliability. It is not so much that older parts are preferred, it is more a matter that consumer/gaming motherboards have hardware and features that often are not well supported by FreeBSD. Don't forget that the vast majority of these motherboards are designed to run Windows. You don't need all the fancy bells and whistles for a typical NAS implementation.

Usually, the common headaches are around NIC's or advanced power saving/sleep states that have been implemented on consumer machines - which is why I suggested turning off the advanced features in bios. Once you get TrueNAS installed and running well, you can turn these features back on one-by-one if you really want them.

I have seen comments on the forum about problems with new Intel NIC's and the 12th Gen processors implemented on latest consumer motherboards. You might search on the forum a bit more to see if anything comes up that is relevant to your problem.

 

[groot opperhoofd]

Got my PCIe NIC in but somehow it didn't automatically configure because it didn't allocate an IP address. Since I couldn't be bothered anymore with scavanging a CPU with iGPU from a different machine I tried truenas scale. This seemed to do the trick as driver support for my motherboard NIC was just supported OOTB as well as the PCIe NIC.

Now running the burn-in test as described on the truenas forum to see if the drives are all healthy.
I consider this thread solved since I have a working system. I don't think that the impact on performance going from core to scale will be an issue in my particular case since the 1GB network connection will likely be the bottleneck.

Thanks for the great support!