boot from flashdrive fails

[sadai]

I have set up freenas on a flashdrive, but it always runs into the 'mountroot' prompt, then I have to replug it and it works.

I know investigating on this is not worth much effort due to the drives are cheap, but maybe there is an easy solution.

[gcooper]

Does the same issue occur with FreeBSD 9 (I could do a quick one-off image of FreeNAS with FreeBSD 9 and see if that fixes things)? Also, what USB stick did you purchase?

[sadai]

that would be great, I didn't try FreeBSD 9

It's an Intenso Microline 4GB

[sadai]

Is your image still in progress?

Regards
sadai

[gcooper]

Replying to sadai:

Is your image still in progress?

I was politely asked not to produce the image :/.

There are some other avenues you could explore, like trying out FreeBSD 9 with the USB live media instead of FreeNAS 8 as it essentially uses the same tech that we do in FreeNAS 8 for mounting USB media; the download link for the 9.0-RC2 amd64 image is available here: ​ftp://ftp.freebsd.org/pub/FreeBSD/releases/amd64/amd64/ISO-IMAGES/9.0/FreeBSD-9.0-RC2-amd64-memstick.img . If the beforementioned image boots, then it's most likely (95% sure) a kernel problem with the USB stack; I'd need to talk with some other folks internally to determine whether or not we could backport the fixes / enhancements (it might not be easy because there was some rototilling that occurred in the driver between 8.2 and 9.x).

[gcooper]

The issue was probably with USB device probe timing, which has been worked around in the upcoming 8.2.0 release by increasing the timeout.

Verifying this is simple: at the boot menu choose option 6 to drop into the loader prompt, then type in...

set kern.cam.boot_delay="30000"

... and press <Enter>. If it's indeed the timing issue then it will most likely boot with the above delay. This shouldn't be an issue with 9.0 as the USB stack has evolved a bit since then, but that requires more research and testing.