Black screen problem when installing truenas from scratch

TrueNAS General
1

Hello,

I was giving my server an overhaul (replacing a failing drive, adding a bunch of new drives, cleaning the dust out while i was at it) and thought it would be a good idea to do a fresh install… and now i have stumbled upon the “black screen problem”.

I can find a bunch of posts describing the problem, several years old even, but havent found an actual solution.

problem: after selecting install on the grub screen the screen goes black and nothing happens.

at least that is what happened when trying to install TrueNAS-SCALE-25.04.2.6

when trying to install TrueNAS-SCALE-25.10.3 i dont even get the grub menu, screen stays black for 1 minute when you expect the grub screen then server starts rebooting.

having tried some of the ‘solutions’ i have come across already i have managed to get the following result (with TrueNAS-SCALE-25.10.3)

after selecting install on the grub screen i get a screen that reads as follows:

error: file ‘/vmlinuz’ not found.

error: you need to load the kernel first.

Press any key to continue…

then after a fraction of a second the grub screen appears for a smaller fraction of a second then this screen again etc…

it alternates back and forth between the black screen with the error message and the blue grub screen about twice a second.

nothing i do makes any difference at this point, cant select anything else on the grub screen or actally press enter to continue on the following screen, it just keeps flashing the two back and forth.

The ‘solutions’ i have found suggest using older hardware for example, where their solution quotes hardware newer then what i am using. but more importantly, i am using hardware that has been running truenas for years already, i did not have this problem the last time i installed from scratch and no hardware has changed since then except the SAS HBA.

The posts i found regarding ‘vmlinuz’ are all about already installed systems that get stuck when rebooting, whith the last resort solution to do a fresh install, which is what i am already trying to do.

Anyone have an idea what to try to get this machine working again?

Thank you.

mobo: ASRock Rack X570D4U-2L2T

cpu: AMD R7 3700X

memory: 4x 32GB ECC

HBA: LSI 9300

expander: adaptec 82885T

boot drive: m.2 sata crucial MX500

hard drives: none (all remain disconnected until install succeeds)

2

You could try booting a live linux version and running cpu stress tests and memtest86 to make sure you didn’t damage anything in cleaning.
Another option is pulling everything like your HBA and expander and leaving only the boot drive in the system and attempting installation.

I can’t tell if you are failing to get the installation image to install or your are having problems after TrueNAS is installed but upon the first boot.

Did you change any BIOS settings?

3

its when doing the install.

in the bios i tried legacy only and eufi only but neither made a difference so i just set it back to both.

secure boot was already disabled.

i’ll try without the HBA

4

Have you left it at the black screen for quite a while? 15-30 minutes? You can also try checking for any available BIOS updates for the motherboard if you haven’t already. Black screen is usually something like a hardware incompatibility or it is waiting on something to initialize.

5

the machine was already running truenas before, were there any changes that could have made it incompatible?

anyway, without the HBA its still going back and forth between the grub screen and the aforementioned message, so removing the HBA didnt help.

and since its going back and forth like that i cant leave it on the black screen anymore, might have to check out what i changed to get the black screen again.

after the spring cleaning i had installed proxmox thinking of virtualising truenas but then changed my mind and went with baremetal truenas again for simplicity’s sake.

proxmox installed and was running, if that means anything. if all else fails i can just go the proxmox route after all then i guess.

i’m gonna try some ubuntu or mint or something this evening and try test everything out, although i dont have a dedicated gfx card installed or a cpu with gfx, just the onboard ASPEED AST2500 and im not sure that can handle desktop os gui. guess we’ll find out.

6

so i had installed ubuntu, everything seems ok…

since i had reset all the bios options to what they were before, but still didnt get the black screen again like i had initialy i started wondering if the old usb stick i was using might have been the culprit for the error message and indeed, if i use another usb stick i get the “normal” black screen again.

not that this solves my initial problem, but at least we’re back to the initial problem.

since i cant figure out how to get truenas installed normally i installed proxmox again and as a test hooked up one of my pools and tried importing them in proxmox, at least theres no issues there.

i would prefer to do the shares with truenas though so now i need to passthrough the sata and sas devices.

theres 3 “FCH SATA Controller [AHCI mode]” devices in the list, which should correspond to a 4port and 2 2port controllers on the motherboard, how do i figure out which is which? i would need 4 ports for truenas and 4 to not be passed through.

theres also 2 “SAS3008 PCI-Express Fusion-MPT SAS-3“ devices in the list, while i only have 1 SAS controller.

7

Yet another memory-issue regurgitator…

People that never designed anything have no idea of how things truly work.

Easiest fix/test:

Install TN on another machine. Transfer disk and report back.

8

there isnt anything mobo/cpu specific done during the install?

ok then, wish i knew that a few days ago.

will report back tomorrow

9

ok, so that worked!

thanks for the tip

10

Is that so?

Go ahead and keep ridiculing members of the forum who are trying to help others. That’s a great way to gain respect.