FreeNAS not booting

[cebear]

I've been trying to set up my first NAS and I wanted to use FreeNAS and hopefully get a personal cloud set up using some plug-ins but I can't even get FreeNAS to boot. 

My hardware is a pentium g3258, and ECS h81h3-a3 mobo (I suspect this is the problem), 8 GBs of generic ddr3 ram, and some hard drives I want to set up into a JBOD. 

I know raid is best for redundancy but I don't have the money to buy a ton of hard drives of the same size right now and I have a ton of 500GB and 1TB Hard drives laying around (5-8 ish) so with a JBOD I can get more space out of it and all I have to do is copy over the data to another JBOD of the same size to do a poor mans raid. 

 

The issue at hand. Once I create a bootable USB with FreeNAS it no longer recogonizes my USB, if I just leave it as an ISO and try and install it to a hard drive it says the USB is empty. I know the USB works as a bootable because I used it as my Ubuntu boot drive for several months in this very system.

Why I suspect the MOBO to be the issue: I've had a lot of trouble with this motherboard. I literally cannot run windows 10 at all on this system anymore. After an upgrade my computer refuses to boot with windows 10 (why I moved to ubuntu). I've got a few laptops and no longer need a desktop per say so I decided a nas with cloud function would better suit my needs. 

 

Incase I can't get FreeNAS to run, suggestions for other free NAS software is welcomed!

[79wjd]

Have you tried booting another computer off the bootable USB (installer) you created? 

 

How did you create the installer USB? 

[cebear]

I haven't tried booting another computer from the stick, I'll try this next. 

I used many ways to set up the drive. I tried using 7zip and win32diskimager, I tried rufus, I tried just extracting the data and leaving it as is, and as I said I tried just using the ISO to install it on a hard drive but none worked. 

[79wjd]

5 minutes ago, cebear said:

I haven't tried booting another computer from the stick, I'll try this next. 

I used many ways to set up the drive. I tried using 7zip and win32diskimager, I tried rufus, I tried just extracting the data and leaving it as is, and as I said I tried just using the ISO to install it on a hard drive but none worked. 

Did you try the steps listed in the FreeNAS manual? 

 

 

https://doc.freenas.org/9.3/freenas_install.html

[Curufinwe_wins]

remember you need two usb drives, and yea it sounds like there might be some sort of drive issue (although you should go into the bios and check boot priority once you install the OS).

[cebear]

I've changed the boot priority. After I install FreeNAS to the USB it no longer reconizes it to be a boot priority 

EG 

plug the USB in and change priority and it says boot 1 is cruzer USB

install FreeNAS 

boots in, goes straight to bios like there's no OS on any disk

I check the Boot priority and it says the cruzer isn't there anymore and that boot 1 is flash USB (should give name of disk if it's inserted and reconized there) I'm working on trying the dd method from above right now, just gotta reformat and clean the flash drive and then we'll be off the the races again

[cebear]

It still doesn't recognize the USB after installing using dd either. 

[cebear]

Ah well, I've tried a lot and I just want this project to be done. I've got a spare windows 8.1 key so I'll just use that and share the drives on my home network. Probably the worst solution, but better than a stack of unused hardware. Thanks for everyone's help