Will it work on a Dell PowerEdge R720XD?

[mkillen]

Have a system disk witt 500 gb, and 12 x 3 TB storage

Have succeeded with installing Ubuntu, but have problems with the filesharing, so maybe freenas will work better?

And this server is only for storage, so Ubuntu is not neccessary.

 

[JaimieV]

Create a FreeNAS USB stick, boot the Poweredge off it, and see if it sees the disks and network. If so, all is probably fine. If not, you've not affected the machine at all.

 

[mkillen]

no luck

seems like I have the same problem as here http://support.freenas.org/ticket/321

 

[cyberjock]

If you really want it to work I'd recommend you add a comment to the ticket that you have the same problem. Include the server model number and BIOS revision if possible.

 

[mkillen]

I have a Dell PowerEdge R720xd

Bios 1.3.6

Cant install from a USB stick. The system halts when this menu shows up:

F1 FreeBSD
F2 FreeBSD
F5 Drive0
F6 PXE

 

[jgreco]

To me, this really sounds like a BIOS disk geometry problem, which was quite common when moving disks or making controller changes many years ago. I was vaguely impressed when I learned that the FreeNAS team had been shipping disk images rather than using an installer (the so-called "installer" is merely a disk-image-writing wrapper) because my impression had been that this was a non-fixable issue... but I had never really investigated exactly how a BIOS would implement this for a flash drive. I kind of wrote it off as someone having fixed the painful-stupid of C/H/S.

Anyways, it appears to me that FreeNAS is built with a disklabel of */255/63; an older FreeNAS system here reports

parameters extracted from in-core disklabel are:
cylinders=967 heads=255 sectors/track=63 (16065 blks/cyl)

If you were to get a FreeBSD install disk and install the smallest possible system onto your flash drive, my guess is that your system might prefer a */16/63 or some other odd geometry. Or possibly maybe there's none at all that works, because sometimes manufacturers forget to test "odd" features like flash drive booting.

 

[mkillen]

ok

installed Ubuntu Desktop with Samba instead, hade to have this mashine up n running today

thnx anyway