Hey Guys I have a problem and I hope you can help me on this one. Sooooo, I wanted to have a nice and simple Home-Fileserver, with Music and Films on it. I looked at software and wanted to do Ubuntu first, but then I discovered FreeNAS. I instantly fell in love, the bittorrent function, the iTunes protocol support, (our Media Centre is a Mac... ) I checked out all the possibilities, and it quickly became clear to me that I wanted a Sata HDD for the Storage, and a Compact Flash Card for the OS, which is pretty small. (Around 40 or 50 MB.) For the Hardware, I installed the OS on some old **** I had lying around, it didn't work out too well, but that was because of the Hardware. After looking around for some Hardware, I bought a Intel Atom 330 Board, it seemed perfect. It arrived, I plugged in all the stuff, and that's where my Problems began. I plugged in the CF Card in the IDE Slot via a Adapter, the HDD via Sata, blah blah...and then I wanted to plug in the CDROM - when I noticed that there was only one IDE port on the Atom Board. Since that, I tried so many things - including phsdiskwriting the image directly onto the Card via Windows, dd'ing the Image to the Card in Linux, putting the CF card in a USB adapter and installing ( - I got a broken Partition Table when putting it back into the IDE port), pluggin a Sata CD Drive which resulted in working fine until the point where FreeNAS searched for a installation Medium and didn't find a CD... I'm pretty much desperate, does anyone have any Idea?
Hmm yeah that's a bit tough. Okay try this. Can you connect your CF dongle into an ide cable? If so plug it into the master port and the CDROM onto the slave. If you can't, you'll either need to connect a SATA CDROM drive or use an IDE<>SATA adaptor on your CDROM. Ebuyer sell them, and I've used them before. The other option I can think is that you'll need to do the install on a PC with two IDE ports and move the CF dongle over to the atom. I'm sure you've already got this link but http://www.freenas.org/index.php?op...id=sug:en#installing_freenas_on_disk_optional details how to install it to as embedded. You should be able to add the storage drive later.
Thanks for your help Installing on another PC won't work, I will get a broken Partition Table again (GPT). Also, I need to install as full so that I can make the OS Partition bigger to install something later on. (LPRng for printing) IDE-Sata adapter won't work as well - FreeNAS will actually boot from the Sata drive, but when asked to install it won't find any CD since it will be looking in dev/acd0 which are the IDE ports. Seems like connecting Master/Slave is my only hope. The CF adapter plugs directly into the IDE port, is there any CF "expansion cable" or something like that?
Hmm why would you get a broken partition table using another PC with two IDE ports for the setup? Does it have an install from FTP option once booted? The fact that its hardcoded to /dev/acd0 may be worth reporting to the developers as a bug - there might be an advanced option to change it to another device, or you could edit some file in the ISO and re-burn it. Definitely worth posting on their forums and seeing if there's a workaround for it I'd say!
I'm not sure if it really is hardcoded to acd0 - it just won't load the CD from anything else, maybe there is a possibilitie to do this I don't know. Somehow, the GPT is kinda fragile and breaks hella fast... I tried something similar and I got a "Primary GPT corrupt or rejected - recovery may not be possible" Error. Posting on their forums sounds like a good idea - there must've been other users with my problem. Thanks so far, I will report back if I make any progress.
The point is, I really want to install it on a CF Card now because - I would have to purchase a key, I don't have any unused lying around - Much bigger Speed when using a CF card Though, the OS is seperated from the config and the data in any way, which makes it 100% replacable, so that's what I'm gonna do for now probably, until I find an answer, thank you.
You don't need speed, it loads everything into RAM! Only booting is faster from CF. A 128MB key is fine - it costs all of £2.
I know about the RAM, but there will be a printer attached, with drivers and a script to check the USB ports, - Anyways, I'm off to buy a USB stick. Thanks
There's lots of really great free software out there, which I really wish I had a real use for. My PC doesn't get used all that much and when I do its just for games, so its been ages since I had to work out probs like this lol
