Greetings. I am a newbie getting ready to move from QTS on an old but good QNAP TS-879 PRO that has been hotrodded with an upgrade from an i3 to and i7 processor with 16GB of RAM.
My question is that once I jump through the hoops of getting in and out of the QNAP’s bios to get TrueNAS up and running, are the updates to TrueNAS available for installation without having to go in and out of bios?
Many thanks!
All updates are done via the webui, you don’t need the bios at all
you should just be able to update TrueNAS through the UI as you can on any other system, and then reboot into the new version automatically. the only thing to keep an eye on is how much free space your boot-pool has, as the tiny emmc that these boxes usually have will require you to clean out old boot environments after upgrades.
caveat, I don’t own any QNAP hardware so if there’s something wrong enough with QNAP hardware that I don’t know about that causes boot failures please chime-in.
Thanks to both Lars and Retro!
No luck. I built a bootable USB with Rufus-4.9 and the latest stable version on TrueNAS obtained from the website which is TrueNAS-SCALE-25.04.2.4. When I boot to that USB drive I end up a series of “error: unknown filesystem.” messages and ending with a “grub rescue >” prompt.
I’ve tried different USB drives, with and without any disks in the NAS, etc. but no luck.
Any idea what I am doing wrong or running up against?
Thanks much!
QNAP systems use a custom BIOS and their custom firmware and upon boot, if I remember correctly, will write their firmware to a partition/section on the first drive to use to boot from. If you look around the web, there are people who have installed Freenas/Truenas onto a QNAP system and outline the required steps. I don’t have a working QNAP system right now. At one time I think they used a glued in DOM to hold their firmware which you could swap out for a Truenas one, but I think later versions of the systems have the firmware soldered to the board. At least the two servers I had did not have the DOM. I do think it can still be done, but you will need to do more research as to the specifics of how.
Just be aware if you are thinking change the motherboard route. That won’t easily work. Everything inside the chassis is custom. The custom backplane physically plugs into a connector on the motherboard. You would have to get a pinout of or figure out the connectors pins/fingers in order to make an adapter to for a regular HBA if that’s even possible. Or you would need to modify some of the chassis to properly fit something like a Supermicro backplane (looks closest in fit without measuring) in it that would replace the existing backplane and then fit and use a conventional motherboard and HBA.
PhilD13, thanks for the information and taking the time to respond. I don’t have the knowledge or, quite frankly, the ambition to put TrueNAS onto this QNAP so probably will just keep it on QTS and try TrueNAS on a Xeon-based server I am about to inherit.
No problem I had intended to do something similar to one of my old QNAP servers, I decided just getting a nice used Supermicro server off e-bay was a better value in time and effort and I can change parts in it if I want or need to.
Yep. My daughter’s boyfriend bought a bunch of newly retired but young Xeon-based Dell servers off a government auction and he’s giving me one and I’ll have fun playing around with that beast.
Here’s an update to my attempt at installing TrueNAS on this TS-879 PRO. I rebuilt the USB using another piece of software called Ventoy instead of Rufus. This time, I was able to boot into the TrueNAS installation software and install TrueNAS on a single disk that I had installed in the NAS. The disk was installed in slot 8 for whatever reason. The Bios did see the TrueNAS boot device but when I rebooted, the bios failed to detect a bootable drive and gave me the message “Reboot and Select proper Boot device or Insert Boot Median in selected Boot device and press a key."
Still appears to be a bios or DOM limitation don’t you think? Do you know if there is any way to easily get around this issue?
Thanks!
As far as I have seen the bios DOM from qnap takes priority on boot. So you will need to get into bios and change the boot priority to match your actual installed drive to be first one to boot.
Now, there can be another way to achieve this, but you will need to physically disconnect the DOM.
Also make sure you have a good CMOS battery (if not change it first). Because the boot order is retained only if this battery is good.
Hope this helps
Thanks smione. I was in the bios and thought I had set the boot order to the disk that TrueNAS was installed in and disabled the QNAP DOM that was labeled as #2 in the boot order. I’ll go ahead and take the NAS down and swap out the CMOS battery just in case that was the issue in the first place.
As far as you know, does the slot in which the TrueNAS boot drive matter? I had the SSD in slot 8 but may try moving it up to slot 1 if that makes any sense.
Thanks again and I’ll keep the thread updated with my findings.
Sure, looking forward to the findings and new learning’s.
Can’t really be sure about your particular model, but on the device I was working, I remember it had 2 SATA controllers - one Intel and another from ASMedia. You could try running a lspci command similar to below:
lspci | grep -i SATA
If that doesn’t help try with ‘controller’ or ‘storage’ etc. with grep. That should give some idea on further investigation with slots.
Ideally the slot shouldn’t be an issue for the bios to detect, but may be you could give a try changing it to any of the first 4 slots.
Probably you have to disable secure boot in BIOS if present on QNAP
I don’t think older models used secure boot; just a standard BIOS that is customized for QNAP. What the QNAP systems physical layout determines as the first slot (bottom left, or left most) is the standard drive to boot from. If it does not detect a bootable drive there it may try to copy the Firmware boot onto that drive and not look at any other drives. This may be why it ignored the boot order setting in the BIOS.
Yes, the date on this bios is early 2012, as I recall, and there is no option to turn “secure boot” on or off. I’ll move the SSD with TrueNAS from slot #8 to slot #1 and give that a shot. If that doesn’t work, I’ll take the cover off and replace the CMOS battery and go from there.
No joy in moving the TrueNAS drive from slot #8 to slot #1. It’s got the better of me… for now.
By the way, the boot options were saved between reboots so I am assuming the CMOS battery is doing it’s job.
Looks like disconnecting the DOM is the next possible option.
By the way, do you see the disk that you want to boot to in any boot device priority list in bios? (Just to make sure it detects the disk in bios)
I have an M.2 NVME installed on an NVME to USB3 module and installed TrueNAS to that drive instead of a slotted hard disk and now have TrueNAS up and running. Not ideal but at least I can play with it. Thanks for your help!
But to your question, yes I could see the hard disk I wanted to boot to but it didn’t like it for some reason.
Likely the way you will need to run it though you might be able to make an improvment. Found out some QNAP systems use a eMMC (eMMC MK2704) as the boot drive and likely is locked.
I don’t think the QNAP model you have has a internal m.2 slot but I think it has a couple esata connectors in the back. That might be an idea to use one of those.