Scale hanging at boot...sometimes

TrueNAS General
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1

Hi all,

This past weekend i made a bunch of changes to my setup, which seemed to go well:

  • Added a new SSD and migrated boot drive from one of my NVME drives to the SSD
  • Took the freed up NVME and used it to mirror my app pool NVME
  • Installed an HBA and migrated my 6 rotational drives from the mobo SATA ports to the HBA
  • Added 2 new drives to the HBA but haven’t done anything with them yet
  • Installed X540-T2 network card in anticipation of 10gbe network (not yet in place)

The issue I’m having is that about half the time, my PC hangs on boot. If I power it off and start it again, it comes up fine.

I see a message like, “initializing ramfs” or “initial ram disk” (I’m afraid I don’t remember specifically the message), and then it gets stuck there. If the machine instead boots, I see that message for a brief moment, then I see the machine continue to boot.

I’ve done a bit of digging and I’ve seen forum posts from people with similar sounding issues, but they all seem to have the hanging boot problem every time they start their PC. In my case, it only happens about half the time.

Is there a log file somewhere that can help? I tried looking through syslog but didn’t have anything jump out at me, though I can’t be sure I’d even know if I was looking at the explanation.

Aside from the hanging machine at boot (half the time), everything seems to be working great!

2

Try specifying boot drive in bios if this happened after the swap? [unless you’re actually booting into grub in which case no clue]

1 Like
3

Hmmm, I did change this to be the USB drive as the primary boot drive for purposes of reinstalling the OS. I will give this a shot later today and report back. Thanks for the suggestion!

4

I checked and unfortunately, that’s not it. I am able to define 2 boot devices in the BIOS. Boot device #1 is the correct SSD. Boot device #2 is disabled.

I’ve noticed this weird consistency in the boot hang-ups - if I restart the PC it hangs. However, if I power it off, then start it again, it starts successfully. It almost seems like the PC needs to completely power reset before it can boot again.

5

Donno, three more (possibly) useless things I can think of:

  1. See if there is a Bios update
  2. See if you have a spare PSU you can test with since power since to be a factor
  3. See if disabling ‘secure boot’ in bios helps