Booting Freenas from SSD in ODD Bay gives error 'HD5 cannot get C/H/S values'

[bobusfindus]

Hello,

I have a Proliant Gen 8 Microserver, and I have installed an SSD drive in the Optical Disk Drive bay on Port 5. I have installed Freenas onto it, but have to boot using a USB stick with Grub on it to chainload the SSD to get it to boot Freenas. This was the guide I followed: https://www.ixsystems.com/community/threads/unable-to-boot-freenas-on-ssd.74327/

That's the idea anyway!

However when Grub hands over to the SSD, I get the following error message: "error : hd5 cannot get C/H/S values". I cannot for the life of me figure out how to fix this! Has anyone got any idea what that error means and how I can fix it? 

I have disabled the G120i RAID controller in the server as FreeNas will be managing all of that.

Please let me know if you need any further details.

Cheers, Bob

[Martinnn · Accepted solution]

Good day,

This will required deep analysis. First step should be to confirm whether the OS and SSD are supported for this server. You could open a support case on this matter.

P.S. Microserver Ge8 has only 4 disk bays. It is likely GRUB enumerating SDD in ODD bay as disk 5. Possibly GRUB not enumerating the other bays as there are no disks in them which could lead to the confusion as well... Did you try to amend the root disk in the grub.cfg?

[bobusfindus]

Hi Martinnn,

Sorry I didn't reply sooner. You're exactley right - Grub wasn't counting the drive bays that had no drive in, so I set it to chainload HD3 (the ODD) and it now boots from that like a dream.

Thanks for your help, Bob