I wanted to try out FreeNAS (based on FreeBSD but with quite a few awesome ‘NAS-like’ features) on a system at a jobsite:
System has 5x 2TB drives in RAID5 (6.7TB usable for storage) hotswappable, 2.5GHz Dual Core Pentium, 4GB DDR2 1066 RAM, 3x 10/100/100 NIC, FreeNAS .7 stable.
I got everything up and running without a problem (it is quite easy), running it off a 1GB USB Flash drive I had lying around. But I wanted to continue using my flash drive for other things and found an unused 128MB flash drive that no one would ever use again. I’d rather waste 128MB than 1024MB…
Formated the 128MB into FAT
Plugged the 128MB flash into the FreeNAS server while it was off
Booted the FreeNAS server using the FreeNAS .7 CD
Pressed 9 to install embedded onto the flash drive
Mount CDROM.
Installing system image on device da0.
gzip: stdout: broken pipe
Error: Failed to dd image on ‘/dev/da0’!
Unmount CDROM.
There was a problem while copying files.
Press ENTER to continue.
Argh. So I checked the flash drive on the main PC again – FreeNAS had written a config file and folder to the device!
It looks like if you boot up the system with a USB flash drive installed, the config file will always be written and you can’t format the device. So just plug the drive in AFTER everything is booted up.
Wiped 128MB again and formatted FAT
Plugged 128MB into FreeNAS - Auto mounted the device as da0
Try 9, 1 again
Mount CDROM.
Installing system image on device da0.
GEOM_LABEL: Label for provider da0a is ufsid/************.
Unmount CDROM.
FreeNAS has been installed on da0.
You can now remove the CDROM and reboot the PC.
So I did just that.
Ok here is how to solve this problem. I have looked everywhere on the web and finally found a solution:
1. Boot from the liveCD but DO NOT plug in the USB stick
2. when its booted (when you see Menu point 1-9) insert the USB. Insert it at the back of your PC, not at the front and not at a hub. If plugged in properly you will see that the freenas has detected your usb stick.
3. now enter 9 and hit enter
4. this time it will work.
The problem is that most motherboards recognize the USB stick an make it a virtual floppy drive. Normally you can’t change this in bios. By adding the usb drive to the system after it booted it is mounted by freenas and not by the bios. Hope this helps, like it has helped me….
When we boot FreeNAS from MultiBootISO stick containing the reeNAS ISO, and try to then plugin the USB Drive to be upgraded, we find that upgrading leads to CDROM not found error. How do we mount the ISO as a recognisable CDROM at the shell prompt. The following does not seem to work:
# mdconfig -a -t vnode -f /FreeNAS.iso -u 0
# mount -t cd9660 /dev/md0 /cd0
Just uploading the raw IMG file on the GUI upgrades the install however.