Cannot boot after successful 2.7.2 install - EFI partition problem?

Sergei_Shablovsky

@User6buinf43 said in Cannot boot after successful 2.7.2 install - EFI partition problem?:

@stephenw10 No, the drives are SAS 12Gb/s so they need to connect to the backplane which connects to a controller. Is there a known working controller that's compatible with a PowerEdge R630 that I could try?

You need to know that on R360 also exist motherboard’s BUILT-IN RAID. (To activate it You need enter special code in appropriate section in BIOS/UEFI, or (not remember right now) hardware key).
So, in situation when Your hardware RAID dies, You may able to connect disks directly to built-in RAID (of coarse, in 80% cases, You would be need to reformat/initialize drive because internal controller not able to recognize system format on drive. But sometime depends on motherboard revision, buil-in controller ask You to import configuration from drive and booting successfully).

Sergei_Shablovsky

@User6buinf43 said in Cannot boot after successful 2.7.2 install - EFI partition problem?:

@User6buinf43 said in Cannot boot after successful 2.7.2 install - EFI partition problem?:

Is there a way to try this hw.mfi.mrsas_enable="1" option with the pfSense installer?

I was able to set this option by choosing "3. Escape to loader prompt" and using these commands:
set hw.mfi.mrsas_enable="1"
boot

The drives then showed up as da0 and da1 with the manufacturer/model displayed instead of just mfisyspd. Installation worked and it boots!

Still trying to find a way to get a boot log from the installer.

So looks like this is FreeBSD installer not properly recognizing some hardware RAID controllers and loading MFI driver instead MRSAS.

Recently I have similar problem when CE (probable the Plus also) version, when installer not see VDRIVE at all if it was ZFS formatted. And installer able to see, choose and successfully installing pfSense on it and working w/o any issues ONLY WHEN RE-INITILIZE TGE SAME VDRIVE ON RAID CONTROLLER’S LEVEL (from it’s BIOS menu).

I wrote bug to pfSense bugzilla, but still no solution from pfSense DevTeam. (May be because this is mostly problem on FreeBSD side, not on pfSense. And the second - this issue not affect exactly pfSense’s hardware, , only users with bare metal DIY servers, so not have higher priority to resolving…).