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FreeNAS 11.0 U2 server dead?

I'll cut straight to the chase: my FreeNAS 11.0 U2 server refuses to boot from either of my USB boot devices.

 

Story: I tried turning on my server so I can try to get the Web GUI working with HTTPS, but it kept looping in the BIOS (i.e. it kept resetting itself without booting into FreeNAS). I switched to my second USB device which I used to make a copy of the instillation via attaching it to the boot device and it worked fine. I, however, wanted to diagnose the problem and took out the backup that worked and replaced it with the initial boot device. Again, it refused to boot in its original USB port and in the port where the backup was plugged in. I took the initial boot device out and plugged in the backup in its original port and it worked fine. I tried plugging in the backup into the initial boot device's port, but it failed. Now both refuse to boot at all!

 

I don't believe that either USB ports are at fault since they both booted Linux Mint 18.2 on a third USB device just fine. The drive also worked afterwords when plugged into my laptop and gaming PC. Furthermore, the two USB boot devices are detected albeit I can't open them since windows wants me to format them.

 

So in short:

1. What the hell is wrong?
2. How can I fix it?
3. If a fresh install is necessary, then how do I recover my data and SMB share settings/users/groups?

 

Thanks for any and all help

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Hello reftyuy,

it is hard to say what is wrong just by the infos you gave.

Theoretically it could be possible that your usb medias are faulty. FreeNAS is not designed to run from an USB Stick, the problem is that it writes to its start media unlike a normal "Live CD" USB Stick like the one for Linux Mint you tried. Mostly theese writes are small but many of them shorten the lifetime of an USB stick, cause they have a maximum of writes on every cell in the flash. But I guess this is unlikely especially that you have tried two sticks. In doubt just try yet another stick.

 

Another possibility is of course a wrong BIOS setting, maybe add some photos of the settings and the boot menu to give us here an opportunity to investigate that.

 

Also maybe your usb medias partitions boot flags are not correctly set. If you have a linux workstation post as an output of

sudo parted -l /dev/sd*

/dev/sd* is of course your usb media. Which device node (the /dev/sd* path is called a device node) is your usb media, you can find out with commands like:

lsblk
blkid

I don't know exactly how to get the needed infos (disk partition structure, type of partition table and flags) under windows. Maybe you could get the infos in the Windows Partition Manager.

Greetings

lal12

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On 8/21/2017 at 6:45 PM, lal12 said:

Hello reftyuy,

it is hard to say what is wrong just by the infos you gave.

Theoretically it could be possible that your usb medias are faulty. FreeNAS is not designed to run from an USB Stick, the problem is that it writes to its start media unlike a normal "Live CD" USB Stick like the one for Linux Mint you tried. Mostly theese writes are small but many of them shorten the lifetime of an USB stick, cause they have a maximum of writes on every cell in the flash. But I guess this is unlikely especially that you have tried two sticks. In doubt just try yet another stick.

 

Another possibility is of course a wrong BIOS setting, maybe add some photos of the settings and the boot menu to give us here an opportunity to investigate that.

 

Also maybe your usb medias partitions boot flags are not correctly set. If you have a linux workstation post as an output of


sudo parted -l /dev/sd*

/dev/sd* is of course your usb media. Which device node (the /dev/sd* path is called a device node) is your usb media, you can find out with commands like:


lsblk
blkid

I don't know exactly how to get the needed infos (disk partition structure, type of partition table and flags) under windows. Maybe you could get the infos in the Windows Partition Manager.

Greetings

lal12

Hey lal12!

 

Thanks for posting, but my problem was resolved at Level1Techs Forums (https://forum.level1techs.com/t/freenas-11-0-u2-server-dead/118493). I don't know what the specific problem was, but replacing my USB sticks seemed to work fine. 

 

The sticks I used initially didn't last a week before failing so I doubt that they exceeded their writes within that time period. As I understand it, FreeNAS loads itself into system memory and thus running it off a USB stick should be fine. The FreeNAS site itself specifies it as the minimum boot device on the Hardware Requirements page (http://www.freenas.org/hardware-requirements/).

 

The BIOS settings weren't the problem since I did not touch them until after my FreeNAS installation refused to boot. It didn't boot when I changed them either. I also formatted the USB sticks with Rufus (FAT32, MBR partition for Legacy BIOS or UEFI, and 8192 KB cluster size) before installing FreeNAS and mirroring them. I ran Rufus to check if there were any read or write errors on the two USB sticks that refused to boot, but none came up. My new sticks seem to run fine, and I'm hoping that it stays that way!

 

EDIT

 

I managed to recreate the problem with the new USB sticks. It seems that either the way I mirror my USBs suck or that FreeNAS 11.0 U2 has a bug where it can't boot after mirroring USB installations. I use the following mirroring method: https://blog.brianmoses.net/2016/04/mirroring-the-freenas-usb-boot-device.html

 

I think I'll stick to one USB stick after reinstalling FreeNAS 11.0 U2 for the 2nd time. Who needs mirroring anyways? *nervously laughs*

Edited by reftyuy
I spoke too soon
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Every Os loads its kernel into the ram, but still it does some reading and writing. Maybe freenas even does swapping on its start drive.

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