Hi,
Has anybody successfully installed TrueNAS on the RD5200? It’s an older rack server running SuperMicro hardware:
- 2U 12 bay SAS frontplate
- X8SI6-F motherboard
- Xeon X3400 CPU
- 16 Gb DDR3 RAM
Here’s what I’ve been doing and experiencing:
- Writing TrueNAS-SCALE-25.04.0 iso image to drive works
- Booting with reset button pressed and iso drive installed forces AMI BIOS and from here I can go to the BOOT menu and BOOT ORDER is present. The only item on the list is the iso drive (even after a successful firmware install).
- Subsequently running the TrueNAS installer seems to work fine. I have a separate internal 512Gb SSD hooked up to act as boot-pool. Maybe overkill but it was lying around.
- So once all the install steps are complete it asks me to reboot with iso drive removed.
- Doing so it boots to blank, displaying a message asking me to reboot with boot drive inserted or to insert boot drive and press any key to continue. It’s stuck here.
- With iso drive removed, the BOOT ORDER menu is completely missing.
- As in point 2, with iso drive installed the BOOT ORDER menu is present but only shows the iso drive as an option.
I’ve tried different boot pool drives, older firmware, connecting the boot pool to different ports, both legacy and EUFI… at this point I’m out of ideas and think that maybe they just might not be compatible, so I’m hoping someone has done this before and can give me some pointers!
I only got into NAS storage properly on Friday so it’s been a mind-warping three days 
Hi,
Funnily enough I’ve just got this working today using similar hardware.
I couldn’t get TrueNAS Scale to work so installed TrueNAS Core for now but will tinker and see if I can get TrueNAS Scale installed instead.
Also UEFI didn’t seem to work for me using Core.
I noticed a strange issue which you also encountered after installing TrueNAS where the boot device can’t be seen by the BIOS.
In my ReadyData, I have an LSI HBA (I can get the model tomorrow) which was disabled during the install with the disk mode in the BIOS set to SATA.
I’m unsure if the disk mode makes a difference as I left it in SATA for most of my troubleshooting.
With the HBA disabled, the BIOS can’t see any drives but the TrueNAS installer can so to resolve this I used the SAS optional ROM in the BIOS (can’t exactly remember which section it was under)
This loaded the LSI ROM from which I could see all the drives. I did configure a RAID 0 logical volume in the LSI configuration utility (CTRL + C when prompted on boot) but this won’t be necessary and probably not best practice.
From the boot menu in the BIOS I could now see all the hard drive entries in Hard Drive priority however this only partially fixed my problem as it wouldn’t boot from TrueNAS unless I used the F11 boot menu.
To fix this I changed the #1 boot option in the BIOS to the disk with the bootloader for TrueNAS on but had to change the Hard Drive priority order as it seems you can only have one boot device??
Regarding the boot menu, I am able to use the DEL key to access it as opposed to booting with the reset button and you can also use F11 to select the boot order.
Let me know how you get on, would be happy to supply further information
Thanks for replying and providing some very very good insight!!! It’s very handy for posterity’s sake but I must admit I caved out of frustration yesterday having not got anywhere myself and people on Discord also striking out… and purchased a new mobo plus HBA. Will see how we get on when that all arrives.
Did you manage to get any further with the HBA and new mobo?
I’ve had trouble getting TrueNAS to switch to the Scale version over the Core by switching update trains, always seems to not switch over on reboot.
I really only need it for iSCSI and possibly SMB so I’m hesitant to try and switchover if the Scale doesn’t install properly.
Yeah, I did. New mobo and related peripherals and she’s up and running!
Sorry I can’t be of any more help, I’m very new to servers. Do Core and Scale use the same backup structure? Could you erase Core, do a fresh install of Scale then upload your Core backup to get it recognising the vdevs properly?
No worries, I’ve managed to get Scale installed after trying again and it seems to only like a BIOS install which I suppose makes sense given the age of the hardware.
Got it all working with iSCSI and a Proxmox cluster so quite happy.
Just a heads up, I was testing old SAS drives with this and stumbled upon ledctl which can blink one of the lights on the caddy to easily identify the faulty drive if you supply the /dev location. Could be useful for you in the future.
Congrats!! Glad it worked out for you 
And ledctl is a fantastic command to know about, thank you! I haven’t seen a way to rename drives to something human readable which would be ideal, but this is a good tool to know about.
