iXsystems Mini XL with 8 6TB drives from 2016. CORE TrueNAS-13.0-U6.7 ASRock C2750D4I motherboard, Apacer 16 GB SATA DOM.
I’m not an IT type nor an expert so please keep things simple.
Got this critical error: “Boot pool status is ONLINE: One or more devices has experienced an error resulting in data corruption. Applications may be affected.”
After searching, found this helpful post which recommended backing up system config which I did.
Not sure I follow here.
You don’t flash the ISO to the (replacement) device you intend to use for your boot-pool. You flash the ISO to a USB stick, boot with that and then pick your intended boot device when running the installer that resides in the ISO.
Be very careful when booted from the USB-stick, if you mistakenly pick one of the drives from your data pool as an installation target you will be writing over your data. Some people prefer to unplug data drives before running the installer, just in case.
Just any small and cheap drive for any available interface you have. Here that would be a SATA SSD, unless you want to go for a NVMe device adapted into the PCIe slot.
If you have a free bay, a 2.5" SSD is the easiest and cheapest solution.
A SATADOM, as you had, is a small SSD module which plugs directly into a SATA port, which is convenient when it can be powered by the slot (which was not the case of your Apacer) but will not come cheap.
OK. I misunderstood the instructions. I will read them more thoroughly once I’m ready. Thanks for the heads up.
I did connect the NAS to an old monitor and keyboard to make sure I can get into the UEFI to set up boot priority and I was able.
Is there a way to access UEFI without a monitor? Usually I only access the NAS through the web interface once its fully booted up and too late to hit del key to access UEFI.
Would I need to format it? Or do I just install, hook up SATA and power cable and then boot with a USB stick, copy over the Config file I already saved and then boot with the new SSD drive?
Well, after exploring the UEFI menus, I continued to boot while hooked up to monitor and keyboard (as I’ve never done this with the NAS) and I think the boot drive died.
I installed the 320GB WD SSD in the NAS and attached pwr and SATA cable. Plugged SATA cable into same SATA port as the SATA DOM card was installed.
Flashed the TrueNAS ISO file to a 16GB USB drive and followed the instructions I link in the original post. I selected “Boot via UEFI” since this MB used UEFI.
I was asked one question which didn’t appear in the instructions and it was something like do you want to install 16GB swap space? I said yes. Wasn’t sure but hope this was ok.
I was very careful to select the 320GB SSD to install and not one of the 6TB data drives. I double and triple checked as the instructions were clear this will be bad.
On restart I got that message about “can not boot system” so checked the UEFI and set the boot device to the WD SSD drive and tried again. Still no boot. There is also an option for “boot menu” instead of going in the UEFI:
I was able to access the web interface where I uploaded the saved config to the drive and then the system reboot and now I cannot get it to boot at all using any combination of setting the UEFI boot order and the boot menu boot order.
I tried moving the SATA cable to another port but that didn’t work.
During the boot process this message shows up showing the drive as “Unconfigured”. Not sure what this means but I suspect that’s the problem.
One thought: the original system was version U6.7 and I installed U6.8. The config file was saved under U6.7 … could there be a compatibility issue with the new U6.8 OS?
I can get it to boot if I manually go into the boot menu (F11) and set “UEFI: Built-in EFI Shell”) and also set UEFI as the boot priority in the UEFI. I thought I tried this earlier a couple of times but it didn’t work. Now it does.
And the system is now updated to U6.8 and all seems to work ok unless I try to reboot which will lead to the error below:
And then if I go into the boot menu (F11) and select UEFI it will continue to boot.
So, I suspect the boot drive is ok physically and the OS install is also ok.
Problem is with the boot process. Seems like it’s trying to boot off one of the data drives. And I’m still concerned about the “unconfigured” status shown for this SSD drive. I’ve done some searching but haven’t found anything useful yet about the significance of “unconfigured”.
I formatted the drive in Windows before using. I was told installation will take care of formatting and other sources have said the same. I don’t recall reading anything about “cleaning” which I’m not exactly sure I understand. Are you talking about setting every bit 0 or something like that? What program do you recommend?
Are you booting from the USB to install TrueNAS?
Yes, booted from USB stick that I installed TrueNAS iso on and it ran the installer to set-up TrueNAS on SSD.
What program did you use to flash the ISO to your USB?
If it was Rufus, try again using Balena Etcher. Rufus doesn’t work for some reason.
I used Etcher as recommended by the instructions I was following mentioned in my original post.
Ugh. I think I found the issue but not 100% sure. Turns out that drive is a regular spinning drive not an SSD. Is that the issue? I did order an SSD yesterday just to have on hand so I’ll try it again when it comes in.
I ran “smartctl -x /dev/ada2” to see if that showed anything and I saw “Rotation Rate: 5400 RPM” and then it clicked. Total brain fart. I’ll update this once the drive comes in later this week or early next week. Thanks for the help so far.
=== START OF INFORMATION SECTION ===
Model Family: Western Digital Scorpio Blue Serial ATA
Device Model: WDC WD3200BEVT-22ZCT0
Serial Number: WD-WXT0E79UJT05
LU WWN Device Id: 5 0014ee 2ae0d5d00
Firmware Version: 11.01A11
User Capacity: 320,072,933,376 bytes [320 GB]
Sector Size: 512 bytes logical/physical
Rotation Rate: 5400 rpm
Device is: In smartctl database [for details use: -P show]
ATA Version is: ATA8-ACS (minor revision not indicated)
SATA Version is: SATA 2.5, 3.0 Gb/s
Local Time is: Tue Oct 21 07:47:47 2025 PDT
SMART support is: Available - device has SMART capability.
SMART support is: Enabled
AAM feature is: Disabled
APM feature is: Disabled
Rd look-ahead is: Enabled
Write cache is: Enabled
DSN feature is: Unavailable
ATA Security is: Disabled, NOT FROZEN [SEC1]
Wt Cache Reorder: Enabled
Actually, that guide I was following on how to install TN says you can use either a hard drive or SSD but recommends SSD. So maybe this isn’t the problem.
I’ve tried setting it in UEFI and also setting it using the F11 Boot Menu I mentioned above.
And the Marvell controller for the SATA port I’m using is set to allow to boot (there’s a screenshot above of the menu). I tried both the original SATA port that the SATA DOM was using and another adjacent port on the same Marvell controller.
Right now the system is up and running and doesn’t have any issues other than rebooting requires manual intervention. I’ll leave it running until I get the new SSD and try the process over again.
Does anyone know what the “Unconfigured” status means? I wonder if it means the drive is not configured for RAID.
I’ve searched the motherboard manual and read through all applicable information but can’t find anytihng in there helpful. I’ll read it again more thoroughly when I have time.
The nas data disk error you posted is telling you the drive was at some point was used as a data disk in an array such as an md array and there is a mdraid superblock on it. The drive can’t be used until that block is removed as systems will see the superblock and think the drive is still part of an array.
Standard formatting and partitioning will not remove the superblock as it is an essential part of the array.
Truenas has the mdadm command (must use sudo in front of the command) which can be used to remove the drives superblock. An example would be sudo mdadm --zero-superblock /dev/sdf1
