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FreeNAS 11.2 not booting

Hi,

I've been trying to upgrade to FreeNAS 11.2 for quite some time now, but can't get it to work.
After updating through the Web UI the 11.2 boot environment is stuck at a blank screen, only displaying 'Booting Normal Bootup'. I also tried to upgrade by flashing the installer to two different USB drives, but the installer is stuck at 'Booting...'
I'm running FreeNAS on an Asrock Q1900-ITX, and have installed it on a 32GB SSD. 

If you have any idea as to what the cause might be or have a solution, please let me know. I'm hoping someone can help me out.

Thanks for any help in advance.

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Are you trying just 11.2 or 11.2U3? Are you able to roll back to a working boot environment?

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2 hours ago, Mikensan said:

Are you trying just 11.2 or 11.2U3? Are you able to roll back to a working boot environment?

I have tried both, no luck with either of them..

I have rolled back to the 11.1U7 boot environment, but would like to update to 11.2.

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11 minutes ago, sandhill said:

I have tried both, no luck with either of them..

I have rolled back to the 11.1U7 boot environment, but would like to update to 11.2.

Have you tried booting to a clean install on a flash drive? Could always import your settings from the 11.1U7 and roll on.

 

If a clean install on the flash drive works, then I would go wipe the 32GB and start fresh.

 

Or alternatively for more things to try, rollback to 11.1U6 and then try to update to 11.2.

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17 hours ago, Mikensan said:

Have you tried booting to a clean install on a flash drive? Could always import your settings from the 11.1U7 and roll on.

 

If a clean install on the flash drive works, then I would go wipe the 32GB and start fresh.

 

Or alternatively for more things to try, rollback to 11.1U6 and then try to update to 11.2.

I have tried installing 11.2 on two seperate flash drives, one of them managed to boot. But I'd like to install FreeNAS on the SSD I have in the machine, and keep my flash drive.. I have wiped and reinstalled the SSD multiple times by now, and have also tried installing the OS to the SSD by using an external USB-SATA connector and installing FreeNAS in a VirtualBox instance to the SSD directly. This didn't boot the OS either.

 

At first I tried updating from 11.1U6, since that was the installed version on the system. When this wasn't working, I installed the 11.1U7 update to see if I could then update to 11.2, but unfortunately this didn't work.

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The idea of using a USB was simply to test it would boot and work with 11.2U3 in case it was a hardware conflict - since you said it did work with one of the USBs that at least demonstrates your system should run 11.2U3.

 

https://www.ixsystems.com/community/threads/uefi-grub-alloc-magic-is-broken-wont-boot.60782/

 

One of the people in this thread said to try a BIOS install instead of UEFI.

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Unfortunately I've tried both BIOS and UEFI already, I just can't get it to work.. And other options I could try?

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Just now, sandhill said:

Unfortunately I've tried both BIOS and UEFI already, I just can't get it to work.. And other options I could try?

When you get the booting normal bootup screen - is there anything else on the screen? 

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Hi,

 

Attached to this post you'll find the screen I am seeing. One is the screen I get when trying to boot the installer, the other one is the screen I get after updating to 11.2U3.

installer.jpg

after updating.jpg

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Just for fun, could you disconnect all your storage disks temporarily and connect the 32GB SSD to another SATA port?

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What are you using to create the USB drive? Rufus? 

Maybe check that the USB is formatted with the MBR partition style (not GPT). 

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I am using the following settings in Rufus, they are automatically set once I open the FreeNAS ISO:

image.png.c52965ade59d7ea9bdc90f0a70ad69aa.png

 

Also, this wouldn't really explain 11.2 not booting from the SSD..

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  • 2 weeks later...

Hey @sandhill,

I had this same issue today.

 

It Turns out that RUFUS was writing the flash drive with gpt even though it says mbr (For those who say it doesn't matter because rufus uses DD mode, I'm not sure of this after the issues I had ).

 

Use win32diskimager instead.

 

You may have to use linux to update the partition table possibly before you will see the flashdrive in windows (Disk manager showed the flashdrive but would not allow me to edit it).

 

I had tried 5 flash drives of different types so had to update the partition table on all of them again. 

 

Also, I was able to boot in UEFI mode after this as well. 

 

UPDATE: tried this again with a different version and still ran into issues so YMMV.

 

UPDATE UPDATE: so the last version that will work is 11.1-u7. From what I can find, the newer versions go to the USB as a GPT partition which for some reason will not UEFI boot on the machine that I have. 

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It looks like the grub bootloader was removed in favor of their own bootloader I think this has something to do with the non-booting when flashing via USB. I was able to efi boot when I copied it to a CD but still had a kernel failure and was not able to boot.

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tldr; Figured it out. It looks like the installer does NOT like usb3.0.

 

I started out trying a CD which allowed me to boot but still had issues after loading into the install with kernel and set failures.

 

Next, I tried using Ubuntu and dd'ed the image to my flash drive and then booted via the USB 2.0 port and was able to select UEFI. (Side note here: this probably works with bios as well but I wanted to use UEFI)

 

The version I am installing is FreeNAS 11.2-U3.

My PC is a random Aliexpress special Chinese Micro PC that doesn't have vendor information anywhere that I can find. 

 

USB 3.0 worked under the old grub install method but the changes made to the custom boot do not play nicely with the USB 3.0.

 

May post this on the FreeNAS forums and see if anything can be done about this. 

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On 5/4/2019 at 6:31 PM, SpaceCadet23 said:

tldr; Figured it out. It looks like the installer does NOT like usb3.0.

 

I started out trying a CD which allowed me to boot but still had issues after loading into the install with kernel and set failures.

 

Next, I tried using Ubuntu and dd'ed the image to my flash drive and then booted via the USB 2.0 port and was able to select UEFI. (Side note here: this probably works with bios as well but I wanted to use UEFI)

 

The version I am installing is FreeNAS 11.2-U3.

My PC is a random Aliexpress special Chinese Micro PC that doesn't have vendor information anywhere that I can find. 

 

USB 3.0 worked under the old grub install method but the changes made to the custom boot do not play nicely with the USB 3.0.

 

May post this on the FreeNAS forums and see if anything can be done about this. 

I didn't even think about USB 3, though I too have had issues with it. However for me it was either it worked or didn't, certainly confusing when it somewhat works for you. Glad you got it figured out man.

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  • 5 months later...

I encountered the same problem during the installation of 11.2-U6 no matter what tools, what usbs (2 or 3), until I use the dd to burn in linux platform. Maybe this is the key.

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On 10/22/2019 at 4:49 AM, siriusy said:

I encountered the same problem during the installation of 11.2-U6 no matter what tools, what usbs (2 or 3), until I use the dd to burn in linux platform. Maybe this is the key.

It is- I fought with this forever trying to get Freenas installed my first time- when I followed their guide step by step and used their tool and settings for creating the bootable drive it all just worked. I love Rufus, but it doesn't play nicely with Freenas, or some other ISOs I have used recently... I have personally been having the best luck with win32 disk imager.

 

Try following the guide on their website exactly, my bet is your problem will disappear.

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  • 3 months later...

Good evening gentlemen,

 

I'm running into the same issue. I was running version 11.2 u7 and made the decision to update to version 11.3.  I took the update through the GUI, which seemed to work just fine, however, after reboot I waited a good 30 minutes and still couldn't connect to the NAS.  So I connected a monitor and sure enough the system was sitting at the "booting" message, as the other member had posted above.  I've tried to reboot a few times with no success so I then tried to repair my 11.3 install, which seemed to work, but still sitting at the "booting" screen.  Trying to understand what you guys did to resolve the issue.  Any help would be very much appreciated.

 

Thank you!

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Quick update, I was able to roll back to version 11.1 update 7 and boot the system.  Unable to install either 11.2 update 7 or update 3, as both versions continue to hang up at boot.  Any suggestions or recommendations would be greatly appreciated.

 

Thanks in advance.

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Hi,

 

In my case this issue had to do with the SSD I was using as the boot drive. 

I installed FreeNAS on a USB and it has been working without any problems ever since. If you are already using a USB drive, maybe try another one? 

And I recommend adding a second drive, that way is one of them fails you'll still be able to boot (and replace the faulty USB drive)

 

Hope this helps anyone!

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