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    pfSense CE installation boots fine, fails to reboot

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    Problems Installing or Upgrading pfSense Software
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    • E
      effitall
      last edited by effitall

      Title pretty much sums it up.

      I downloaded current pfSense installation on 10-1-24.

      I can successfully install pfSense, however on reboot, it fails to find the boot drive:

      "zfs:/pfSense/ROOT/default failed with error 5; retrying for 3 more seconds"
      "Solaris: NOTICE: Cannot find the pool label for 'pfSense' "

      The system will ALWAYS boot perfectly fine from a cold boot.

      The system will ALWAYS fail to boot on a warm reboot.

      Re-root is fine.

      The target system is a Dell Optiplex 3070 with an i5-8400, 16GB of RAM. Boot disk is a SK Hynix NVMe. I updated the Optiplex BIOS to the latest version. I've gone through and disabled Secure Boot and any other oddities in the BIOS. It's currently UEFI only. (unfortunately the latest BIOS seems to have disabled legacy boot for internal devices)

      Using the same installation media, I can install/reboot on a J1900 mini PC just fine.

      Any ideas here?

      Thanks!!!!

      1 Reply Last reply Reply Quote 0
      • stephenw10S
        stephenw10 Netgate Administrator
        last edited by

        Hmm, so you don't have to reinstall? Just power cycle it to boot correctly?

        Sounds like it could be a timing issue. If you interrupt the boot at the bootloader menu and then continue (by entering boot) does it succeed?

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        • E
          effitall @stephenw10
          last edited by

          @stephenw10

          That's correct. No re-install necessary. Just poweroff and cold boot. Perfectly fine. No corruption of the FS ever detected.

          I just interrupted the boot process at the menu. Waited a minute and then fired off the boot command. Still fails.

          Hard power off....Power back on...Successful boot.

          I'm stumped.

          1 Reply Last reply Reply Quote 0
          • stephenw10S
            stephenw10 Netgate Administrator
            last edited by

            Hmm, does it fail to the mountroot> prompt? Do any drives show there if you enter ?

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            • E
              effitall @stephenw10
              last edited by

              @stephenw10 It does fail to mountroot. No drives are found when you ? for the list.

              For whatever reason, on reboot it just never finds the NVMe drive, but again...cold boot is fine.

              I'll attempt to load it on a traditional HDD and see what's up. I don't think I have SATA SSD on hand...I'll look.

              1 Reply Last reply Reply Quote 0
              • stephenw10S
                stephenw10 Netgate Administrator
                last edited by

                Hmm, weird.

                I have seen NVMe drives that are only recognised at cold boot. But in those cases it fails to boot entirely.

                You could try setting the loader value for kern.cam.boot_delay=10000 to something higher. That's set in /boot/loader.conf.

                If that works add it to /boot/loader.conf.local.

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                • E
                  effitall @stephenw10
                  last edited by

                  @stephenw10 I added the 10000 value into the loader.conf. No difference. I can try and raise that. I'm currently installing to a SATA HDD to see how that behaves.

                  Definitely bizarre.

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                  • stephenw10S
                    stephenw10 Netgate Administrator
                    last edited by

                    Yes, sorry, 10000 is the value we usually use. You might need something higher.

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                    • E
                      effitall @stephenw10
                      last edited by

                      @stephenw10 Okay...So SATA HDD works fine. Looks like an issue with this specific NVMe drive. Going to search for another NVMe and try that to confirm.

                      Thanks!!!

                      E 1 Reply Last reply Reply Quote 1
                      • E
                        effitall @effitall
                        last edited by

                        Resolved!

                        For whatever reason, the Hynix NVMe wouldn't play ball with pfSense. Replaced with a Crucial and we're off to the races.

                        Thanks!

                        1 Reply Last reply Reply Quote 0
                        • stephenw10S
                          stephenw10 Netgate Administrator
                          last edited by

                          Nice 👍

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