Truenas wont boot with drives installed

TrueNAS General
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1

I have 24 disks, a mix of sas and sata drives installed in 2 sa120 das units connected via a LSI 9200 8e in hba mode. The setup is a little unconventional as I am using a usb drive to with clover installed to boot from a pcie ssd and it does work, when there are no drives plugged in. When there are drives plugged in the boot fails, with just a single red _ in the middle of the screen. The work around has been to unplug the external sas cables before booting up and then plug them in during the boot, specifically after truenas has gotten a few seconds into the bootup. Plug them in to early and it will fail, too late and drive pools will be stuck offline despite the disks being in the system and showing up.

Not sure if the issue is related to clover or my lsi card or something wrong with my truenas config but I haven’t been able to figure it out. I have tried to look at logs on the output but I don’t really know what I am looking for and haven’t been able to figure out what the problem is.

Quick edit: Forgot to mention if I leave everything plugged it fails before reaching the welcome to truenas screen (autoboot wont work for some reason as well but thats a minor issue) and if i plug in the drives at that screen before hitting enter the boot will fail.

2

What version of TrueNAS?

3

TrueNAS Core 13.0-U6.1

4

Well. You could try scale.

5

I could but I don’t really want to. I’ve used core since it was freenas and I’ve never had any problems until now and have no use for any of scales features. Would switching even fix my issue? Isn’t it even less stable then core?

6

It’s differently stable.

Often where core fails (exotic hardware) scale works.

At a minimum it’s a good diagnostic.

Does it work in scale but not core? Then maybe it’s not just the hardware.

It sounds to me like you have always had this issue with this setup. And it sounds like an exotic boot scenario.

7

It worked on core before I did a fresh install about a month ago when I upgrade to 13 and switched to using a nvme boot drive with clover as the bootloader.

I don’t think I am using any exotic or strange hardware that wouldn’t be supported. 2xlsi cards, a mellonex connectx4 nic and a nvme to pcie adapter but thats a dumb device and the server, a dell r730, supports pcie bifurcation it just can’t boot from it.