Thread: Installing Freenas

vid about version 10,,
is a lot different from 9
[ame]https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=8TS6vvpP1yQ[/ame]

Originally Posted by incisor

No wonder it's playing up

What's that crap on the desktop

and where did your team finish this year???

Interestingly i just tried the windows .iso to usb creation tool,, and it just says - Not a valid .iso

Originally Posted by Pedro_The_Swift

and where did your team finish this year???

When yours has as many as mine then you can start flinging crap
😉

We've been getting the same errors and results.

So time to try new tactics.

I first tried to do the 'mount ISO' file thing and boot from a virtual DVD drive.
That is, right click the ISO and mount it. It mounts the ISO file as another drive.
The drive is active until you eject it. That is, on reboot it's listed in my (UEFI) bios as another drive I can boot from.
No dice! I selected it as the only bootable device(all others disabled) and it only comes up with a msg saying boot drive not valid or detected or whatever. So some partial success there.
Then there's really no other alternative other than to go back to 20th century tech .. and burn it to a disk.
Just used the Windoes burn to disk feature.
Right click ISO file and select burn to disk. There are really not any options other than to verify the burn(which I did) and if there are any option to 'close the disk' then use it.
If the disk is still able to be written too(ie. open disk) it may not boot.
Long story short .. on DVD and boots up as per expectation .. to the GRUB loader.
Selected option 1 which is to install .. next page sends you to the list of drives(I have about 6 on this PC .. my main and only PC) .. loaded whatever files it needed too and installed it to the USB stick I had at hand.



note to be mindful of:
I got recently retired old PC sitting in parts but is missing a few vital ones for it to run, otherwise I'd have run it properly.
But right at the very end of the install/loading routine, it stops with a list of options you can choose from(14 in total I remember).
At the very end of that list is the message to be mindful of .. access the FreeNAS server via the web interface (from another machine).
This was the part I couldn't do, nor wanted to do for fear of possible data loss on my current PC.

So .. recommendation
and confirmation that it can and will work:
ditch the first USB stick, and replace it with a disk(DVD/CD/DVR) and boot from that .. this is just to install it to the USB stick.
*Note: the space required for the bootable install media is only 500Mb or so, so easily fits onto a CD.

This way you don't need any other third party software, just one single solitary 0.05c disk of some type. I'm pretty sure even WinXP had the burn files to disk option too.
And there was no need to find or use a bootable disk option either(which I thought would be the case) .. as the GRUB loader is already present in the data in the ISO.

If you want to see a list of what is on the ISO, just use the mount option in the right click menu list on the ISO file.
To close that newly mounted drive, right click it and eject it.
I was hoping that once it was mounted it would operate as a bootable drive itself .. thus negating the need for the disk burn method.

Something else to note:
Once the (FreeNAS)USB stick is created, Windows can't really see it properly.
I had to use PartitionMaster to delete the partitions on the USB stick.
(and I'm too lazy to use the command prompt).
I'm assuming that it's formatted in the ZFS format, which Win can't see read).
I had a look in Windows Disk management console and again no good. All it could see of the (now) FreeNAS USB stick was about 300kb, so I couldn't delete/format/partition or any other operation to restore that USB stick to it's 8Gig capacity ..

anyhow, hopefully all this will help you get it going .. now I'm curious and may try to get the old PC going again to have a poke around.

ooops sorry about the usb stick,,
try "Mini Tool Partition Wizard"
worked several times for me--

as all the boxes sata connections are taken up with hdds,,
I'll have to see if it will boot from an external usb/dvd drive--

I wonder if it will see the drive as a cdrom or usb?

who knows?

Originally Posted by incisor

When yours has as many as mine then you can start flinging crap
😉

yesterdays news = fish wrapper

UPUP

Originally Posted by Pedro_The_Swift

ooops sorry about the usb stick,,
....

Nah, easy peasy fix .. interesting to see tho.
I use generally a Linux Live distro on recalcitrant memory.
Have had some successes in retrieving some data, and saved media cards and the like ..

Originally Posted by Pedro_The_Swift

... as all the boxes sata connections are taken up with hdds,,
I'll have to see if it will boot from an external usb/dvd drive--

I wonder if it will see the drive as a cdrom or usb?

who knows?

There's an interesting method to try.
Why not pull one of the drives, and load the entire lot of the contents of the ISO file onto one of those drives(obviously drive 0) and boot from that.
Remember all you are doing is using that boot up routine to get to the install routine to install to the USB stick.
Once you have the USB stick up and running, format that drive again(to clean it up) and it should be highly probable that you'll discover an uncle named Bob!

See, when I used Windows burn to disk ability I didn't see or use any indication to make the disk bootable at all.
The folder in the FreeNAS ISO called Boot, contains another folder called GRUB. I think all the boot data is located in there, and the boot.catalog file must point to it for the system to boot up into the GRUB loader(which is all you're trying to do here.

I reckon it's worth a try, and it cost 'ya nuthin other than a few minutes to remove a HDD, place it temporarily onto a PC to transfer the contents of the ISO onto the HDD .. back into the box on the drive connector that is set to boot from.

Rightclick the ISO, and select 'mount' .. no need for extraction or any other tools.
new drive appears called FreeNAS, open it up and all the files will be named in capital lettering!!
No probs.
Cntrl-A to select all, send to the HDD for the NAS box, and wait for it to transfer. That HDD now into the box as the boot drive .. and hopefully Bob will reveal himself.
The only other thing I'd do to be sure of the box loading up on FreeNAS after a successful install routine, would be to physically disconnect the HDD for the first boot up, so that it's sure not to confuse the boot process.
If all goes well, reconnect the HDD, open up FreeNAS's web interface from another device and format all your drives the way they recommend too.

Or if you have an external enclosure where you could temporarily place one of those HDDs(or any other you may have).

Otherwise, an external USB disk drive should be fine too. But considering the trouble we've had trying to get a USB stick booting up

I'm still thinking part of the problem, or maybe the actual problem has been the bootloader issue.
That is, we've been trying to make the USB stick bootable, and the data in the ISO is already 'bootable'.
So maybe a conflict of boot loaders or something.
Remembering that when I finally had success, it was by not making the DVD bootable.
Although in saying that, I did also try to make the USB stick using ISOtoUSB without the bootable option too.

I'm not Geek enough to know with 100% certainty what I've done wrong, and how to fix it.
I'm only 11% Geek(and that's pushing all the cheating boundaries too!) .. yeah! ... did the test many years ago.
Turns out I only have 'geekish tendencies' .. which is well below where I'd like to be.
Geek God or Dysfunctional Geek would've been awesome, and had I been at that level, not only would I have typed up two lines of code and got you up and running a few days ago I could have easily owned your FreeNAS box too