I’m very new to TrueNAS and learning a lot in the past few days. I’ve been having the worse time trying to install a Windows Server 2025 VM on TrueNAS! My problem is that I never get the “press any key” prompt to start the windows install.
I’ve been scouring posts and videos about how to install Windows iso but nothing has worked.
I’ve tried:
injecting virtio drivers into the iso using a program called ntlite
booting to iso through the normal setup process when creating the vm (uploading the iso to the instances volume and then selecting the iso in the “Image*” field)
creating a bootable windows server USB using rufus and plugging it in physically to the PC and adding it under the “Devices”
Enabling and disabling secure boot
recreating the vm/instance
Tried full version of windows server iso, evaluation iso, windows 11 iso
Tried all root disk i/o bus types including Virtio-SCSI
Adding a TPM
Using the bootable USB method always gets stuck at: [INFO] Starting Microsoft Windows bootmgr…
The full output is below:
[INFO] UEFI v2.70 (EDK II, 0x00010000)
[INFO] QEMU Standard PC (Q35 + ICH9, 2009)
[INFO] EFI Development Kit II / OVMF 0.0.0
[INFO] Secure Boot status: Setup
[INFO] Disconnecting potentially blocking drivers
[INFO] Searching for target partition on boot disk:
[INFO] PciRoot(0x0)/Pci(0x1,0x0)/Pci(0x0,0x6)/USB(0xB,0x0)
[INFO] Found NTFS target partition:
[INFO] PciRoot(0x0)/Pci(0x1,0x0)/Pci(0x0,0x6)/USB(0xB,0x0)/HD(1,GPT,3E998297-B46F-4EFD-9EDE-D9602B68B9C5,0x800,0x1CA2F68)
[INFO] Starting NTFS driver service:
[INFO] NTFS Driver 1.7 (ntfs-3g 69d8cbc0)
[INFO] Opening target NTFS partition:
[INFO] Volume label is ‘SSS_X64FREE_EN-US_DV9’
[INFO] This system uses 64-bit x86 UEFI => searching for x64 EFI bootloader
[INFO] Launching ‘efi\boot\bootx64.efi’…
[INFO] Starting Microsoft Windows bootmgr…
All the other methods just slowly go through all the different boot options like CD-ROM, PXE, etc. until it reaches the end where it brings me to a UEFI Interactive shell command prompt and if i type in exit, it enters me into the BIOS.
I’ve seen some people have a CDROM option to mount the iso under “Devices” but i’m assuming that’s outdated.
Thanks
Some specs:
Version: TrueNAS Community Edition 25.04.1
CPU: Intel Core Ultra 5 225
RAM: 64GB DDR5
VNC isn’t working so i’m using the Serial Console (don’t think that makes a difference)
I know this isn’t the question you are asking, and I am very sorry that I can’t help you with your issue, but are you sure you want to use Windows Server 2025 and not 2022?
Even for Hypervisors like Proxmox, you see many so many problems in the forum.
Heck, my recent bare metal installation of 2025 was plagued with issues.
IMHO TrueNAS is a great NAS and a not so great Hypervisor.
Windows 2025 on TrueNAS sounds like a nightmare to me.
So unless you absolutely have to, I would stick with 2022 for now.
But I know this isn’t always possible and again sorry for hijacking your post instead of answering your question.
Thank you for responding! Oh my goodness, I know what you mean. I have other windows server 2025’s (both physical and vms on proxmox) and for months and months (and still today) it’s plagued with an issue where the desktop blinks black non-stop and makes it unusable most of the time. Geez!
Well I wanted to keep them all 2025 and hope that it gets fixed one day, lol. But I also see your point and makes me think twice. However, I think my issue is also for any windows iso. I tried windows 11 as well and couldn’t get the installer working.
Thank you for your info! Good to know its not just me having major issues with windows server 2025 (separate from this issue…I think?)
Thanks for that, I havent seen that page. I learned I needed to enable "discard’ on proxmox for TRIM since I use nvme drives! I think for the most part, I followed the rest of what it said.
I got it workineg now. I believe it’s been working all this time but as I mentioned earlier I couldn’t get VNC for display so I was using the serial console. It turns out, the “press any key” prompt only appears in VNC… and did NOT ever appear in the “serial console” from within truenas itself.
Something to consider as well, the web version of VNC that TrueNAS uses is sketch at best. I use a standalone VNC Viewer install just for this situation. You can start it as soon as the start button is pressed on the VM. It’s got a glitch where the mouse and the pointer don’t line up but that can be fixed once you get the installation done. It’s easy enough once you’re in the setup process to use the keyboard so for me it’s a better, yet not optimal solution.
Thank you Dave, I am having that exact issue so that’ll be helpful.
However, I have a new issue with windows server 2025…after I join the domain, it will no longer boot to windows after the next reboot…
Windows Server 2025 is so bug riddled!!! I haven’t been able to fix it yet… I saw some posts about registry edits that looked promising but it hasn’t seemed to resolve the issue for me.
another update…I tried going with windows server 2022 and I thought it was working because after multiple reboots (after joining to the active directory domain) it could boot to windows. But I just restarted again today and its doing the same thing now. Going to the blue screen “Choose an option” and can’t boot to windows.
