There are a lot of discussions about this in various places, but I’m still a bit confused. I thought I would be prompted during installation to select a boot drive and then an operating system drive. However, the installation was very minimal—it only asked for installation media and mentioned redundancy, which I followed, then installed the OS and selected the WEB UI configuration, after which it asked for a reboot.
I had planned to install the OS redundantly while using a single boot drive, but is that not possible? Is the boot drive shared with the OS? I’m confused by the information I’ve found in various places.
Why did you think this? Because none of the docs nor any of the install guides I’ve seen should have led you to expect this.
And perhaps more fundamentally, what do you understand to be the distinction between the “boot drive” and the “OS drive”? It’s possible, technically, to put the boot loader (GRUB) on one device, and chain boot from that to the main OS device, but it’s very hacky and completely unsupported. In an ordinary TrueNAS installation, as Jorsher says, the boot drive is the OS drive, and it’s been this way for at least 15 years.
@Jorsher: Arre you confusing “OS” with “storage pool”?
If you substitute the words, your post makes more sense. It sounds like you have at least 3 drives, but you only want to install the TrueNAS OS on a single drive, while using the remaining drives for redundant storage.
I switched the words around in your post to look like this.
No, I meant exactly what I said in my original post.
@dan Yes, I was thinking TrueNAS did something along the lines of what you described. Why? I have no idea.
The language feels confusing. Why not just call it OS and remove the language entirely of boot? I see boot as something separate from an operating system. You often see the boot partition as separate than the operating system. So, I figured TrueNAS might have extended this to have some disk required for booting.
