I plan on installing TrueNAS on the HL15 when it is delivered. As I understand the process, I will need to boot the TrueNAS installer from an USB stick and write TrueNAS to the boot NVME disk. Is this procedure correct? Are there an issues I may encouter in the install?
This unit is to serve as a replacement for Synology NAS and also to serve a limited number of apps.
Thanks in adavnce for your assistance.
You’re correct. USB stick should work just fine. Alternatively, you should be able to use the onboard BMC to boot from the ISO file. Either way, from there you install to your boot drive which the onboard NVME drive is perfectly acceptable for.
I run TrueNAS on my HL15 1.0. I pretty much did it exactly how you described, but I ended using SATADOM’s for my mirrored boot drives instead of the NVME. I wanted that slot for special VDEV’s.
I don’t recall any issues installing TrueNAS, but it’s been a few years ago for me. One thing I might suggest is that small NVMe are pretty cheap, and it seems like reinstalling the factory image of Rocky/Houston isn’t as simple as a single file download or following a set of clearly published instructions. If it were me, i would pull the OEM SSD and set it aside in case I did want to go back to it for labbing, confirming “fully burnt in” or whatever, and install TrueNAS to a different SSD not overwriting the shipped OS.
Thank you both for your advice. Replacing the boot NVME with a fresh NVME seems to be prudent and I’ll look for the Kingston replacement.
For my custom built HL8, I bought a 32GB Intel Optane M.2 drive on Ebay since TrueNAS doesn’t really need much OS drive space. The optanes are supposed to have really good write endurance compared to a consumer NVME drive. Just another option for you to consider. Looks like you can get 16GB for $10-$15 or 32GB for around $30 on Ebay still today.
Thanks for the suggestion, yet another option.
I’ve tried booting the TrueNAS installer from a USB stick. Since I do not see an option for setting a temporary boot drive on the ASRockrack Romed8-2T motherboard, I set the USB stick as the boot drive and rebooted the system from the IPMI KVM interface. The system goes through the boot process and gives the option to load the installer. After this the KVM screen goes black and there is no longer any response from the system.
Any ideas? This is with a HL15 v2.
Are you sure the boot USB is good? Can you boot to it on another system? How did you create it; balena etcher?
Assume you are using the latest Scale 25.04.
Perhaps something about UEFI vs Legacy BIOS boot? Or Secure Boot setting?
I don’t see anything obvious about people complaining about using TN on that board, but you could cross post to https://forums.truenas.com/ if you haven’t already. Here’s one thread with some ideas SCALE install gives black screen - TrueNAS General - TrueNAS Community Forums.
Of course there are the obvious steps like confirming latest firmware versions or trying to boot without any of the PCIe cards installed, or to try an external monitor. I’d confirm you have a good install stick first, though.
Thank you for following up. I’ve tried 2 USB sticks and 2 separate downloads of the iso 25.04. One stick has been recently used to install Ubuntu with no issues. I have tried both USBA ports. I’ve the default UEFI boot setting and checked that the Secure boot was disabled. The latest bios is P3.9 which is from this summer, I believe. I have only one added PCIE card, the 45Homelab supplied 10G SFP+.
I am using the KVM remotely because I have no VGA monitors. I’ve tried with monitors at 2K and 1K resolution, neither can be set to VGA 640x480.
Are there any settings that need to be changed on the HL15 other than the boot order, for example, I assume booting over USB is allowed in the default configuration.
Thanks again. I am really puzzled by this.
I wasn’t questioning the physical integrity of the USB stick (although that is a potential failure mode I suppose), I was asking about the software used to create the USB from the *.iso file. Quite often I have found one software to work better than another depending on the OS being installed. BalenaEtcher usually works better than Rufus for me these days. There is also Ventoy which will boot to the ISO in a different way.
Your second point about Ubuntu is a good one. Was that on the HL15, or some other machine? Can you successfully boot a different iso from USB on the HL15, either the Ubuntu installer you mentioned, a Proxmox or Unraid download, a Live image, etc. Rule out something like a basic problem with the IPMI on the your Asrock board.
If other OS installers and/or OSs boot fine in the IPMI, then there may be some GRUB settings that might help you boot.
If the board is basically booting other OSs, but just not the TN installer, you might get more help in the TN forum.
Balena etcher is my app for burning isos. I’ve never had an issue with it. The Ubuntu installer was used on an elder Intel Windows computer.
Perhaps a bootable Ubuntu install on the USB stick would be useful. These sticks are both USB 2 as I don’t have a USB 3 piece, but I assume they should be compatible as I never have had a problem mixing 2 and 3 components.
Thanks for you patience and aid.
+1 for Ventoy. It makes ISO installs super easy, and I have indeed used it to get around a proxmox ISO boot issue.
@phos I think some screenshots might be helpful. I have the V1 HL15 so your KVM solution is different then mine. I do have an ASROCK Rack motherboard in my HL8 system which might be the same IPMI/KVM. I installed TrueNAS on my HL8 just fine but it would have been an older version of TrueNAS.
Speaking of older version, you could try the Electric Eel ISO to see if that makes a difference.
https://download.sys.truenas.net/TrueNAS-SCALE-ElectricEel/24.10.2.4/TrueNAS-SCALE-24.10.2.4.iso
Ryan and David, I much appreciate your help. I’ve solved the install problem. For the first time after a number of USB installs over the years, I discovered the boot manager selected the wrong partition of the USB stick for the install. After examining the USB stick partitions, I was able to select the proper boot iso and the install proceeded without a hitch.
Now I am awaiting the SATA and NVME drives before building the pools and I’ve a GPU and NVME card yet to install. Although I’ve wrangled computers from the IBM 1640 punchcard days, there’s always something new to surprise. I’m sure I’ll have more questions and I trust you will humor my queries.