I am running TrueNas on a Cisco UCS C240 M4. It has 24 drives. The Cisco raid card is in JBOD mode.
100 GB SAS SSD (x2) - Raid 1: Boot Drives
100 GB SAS SSD (x2) - Raid 1: “Apps” Drive for container virtualization
The rest are HDD that I use for storage
My issue is when I boot, it does not find GRUB unless I slide out the caddies for all of the drives except for the two boot drives. I then have to connect the rest of the drives after I have successfully booted up.
I’m going to go out on a limb and guess that the server is trying to boot from a disc that is not the boot disc…? Most recently, this was the error I encountered:
Go into the BIOS setup and select the boot drives. Sounds like the BIOS lost the configuration. If this fixes it and later on the problem occurs again, replace the CMOS battery.
Disregard but at least take a look. Given the error messages it looks like it did find GRUB but did not like to boot.
I have such servers at work and the booting is messed up. You have to manually select the boot device(s) in the LSI BIOS somewhere.
To be clear, I don’t know if HBA software works the same as the software which my Enterprise servers use. But, we do use software Linux MD RAID-1 for the OS, which requires us to select both primary and alternate boot disks.
Enter the LSI BIOS
Get to the disk list
Select primary boot disk, then use Cntl-B
Select secondary boot disk, then use Cntl-A
You should be done
Again, don’t know if this works for HBA firmware…
Last, JBOD mode has a specific connotation here in the TrueNAS forums. It implies using a RAID card with each disk as a LUN. Not the same as HBA mode, and certainly not as reliable as HBA mode. We actively discourage RAID cards due to potential data loss issues, (when used with ZFS).
