Installing off ISO on disk using grub

TrueNAS General
1

I didn’t see this topic, and got pretty close… however maybe I’m missing something. I pulled down the TrueNAS SCALE ISO, checked and put it on a drive on the system.

I made a customXX.cfg for GRUB like so:

# Booting off sdd primary partition... 
# May be a requirement to rename ISO as shown as grub was throwing an error implying that's the case
# all_video for use with montior
menuentry "truenas-scale-2404.iso" {
  insmod all_video
  insmod ext2
  set isofile="truenas-scale-2404.iso"
  loopback loop (hd3)$isofile
  linux (loop)/vmlinuz boot=live toram=filesystem.squashfs iso-scan/filename=$isofile quiet noeject noprompt splash
  initrd (loop)/initrd.img
}

So the kernel boots and I see a (video mode text console) error before the fs fails to load:

[xxxx] usb 5-1: device not accepting address 2, error -71

BOOT FAILED!

This Live System image failed to boot.

Maybe I missed something like not forcing other img into ramfs? I haven’t had much luck trying to boot of external drives before, and was trying this first as it works often with linux distros.

edit: Plugged in a mouse and switched USB ports for the kb and USB error went away, but I still have the boot failure due to incorrect or lacking fs image… :3

edit 2: I found a USB drive and slapped the crappy BIOS around until it allowed it to boot off of it, but if anyone knows the anwser I’d prefer to just use grub boot in the future. :3

2

Hi. I am a total newbie here, so my response may not be the best. My experience using an iso image on a usb got an error “load kernel first”. The responses on-line suggest turning off “secure boot”, but it was already off.
I was able to install from the usb by using Rufus (on windows 11) and selecting the option to create a DD image (and not the iso image).

1 Like
3

I was looking for a method to boot off an internal drive to make future installs easier. As I outlined above I got close, but without docs I didn’t want to trail and error for hours to resolve that.

4

@thendrix2 - I don’t understand.

Are you testing installs?
So you can try various options?

TrueNAS is designed to use an install media just once, (or during recovery). You then boot that install media, to install to another drive, (internal or external). After that, any updates are done to the running OS media.

5

ventoy works well

It allows you to make a USB disk with a directory of isos (can be nested), and you can include checksums.

Tis easy to install from.

Not quite what you mentioned, but also, unless you’re doing a lot of testing, then you shouldn’t need to install from iso very often. Once installed you can simply upload an .update file to install any version in a new boot environment.

1 Like
6

Thank you, this worked for me!