# Problems booting FreeBSD 13.0-RELEASE install image on DELL PowerEdge R730



## Bendodroid (Apr 16, 2021)

Hi folks,

as the title suggests, on my R730 the FreeBSD installer does not boot from a USB flash drive.
I reach the loader prompt, select normal boot, then the wall of text appears which eventually hangs on:
`Root mount waiting for: CAM usbus0 usbus1 usbus2`
which at some point reduces to just the first two elements, then just `usbus0`.
After some time it fails into a prompt that does not accept any keyboard input (at least via iDRAC).
I'm quite lost as to why this is the case and I'm reluctant to blame it on the hardware,
Ubuntu Server 20.04 or Proxmox VE boot just fine.

It also has no exotic RAID hardware installed, just the internal backplane with 8 SAS/SATA slots.
The CPUs are two E5-2660 v3 @ 2.60GHz with 192 GB ECC RAM.
In the PCIe risers are two Broadcom 4-Port GbE Cards that seem to be detected just fine if I interpret the boot output correctly.
There are currently two HDDs installed, but removing them does not seem to make a difference.
I've tried both legacy boot and UEFI, both without luck.
If you would like to see the BIOS settings, I'll happily provide screenshots.
To my knowledge, the latest firmware updates are installed.

Behind this link you'll find a recording of the iDRAC remote VNC window during boot:





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Thanks in advance,

--
Bennett


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## T-Daemon (Apr 16, 2021)

Have you performed cksum(1) on the downloaded image?

You could try to boot 12.1-RELEASE [1], EOL now, and upgrade to 13.0-RELEASE.









						HW probe of Dell 072T6D A01 (PowerEdge R730) #4389b1ce81
					

A database of all the hardware that works under bsd




					bsd-hardware.info
				




dmesg:








						HW probe of Dell 072T6D A01 (PowerEdge R730) #4389b1ce81: dmesg
					

A database of all the hardware that works under bsd




					bsd-hardware.info
				





[1] http://ftp.freebsd.org/pub/FreeBSD/releases/ISO-IMAGES/12.1/


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## SirDice (Apr 16, 2021)

Might be the same issue as this: https://forums.freebsd.org/threads/12-2-13-0-root-mount-waiting-for-usbus0.79840/


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## Bendodroid (Apr 16, 2021)

SHA256 matches.

I'll create a 12.1 drive and post results here.

EDIT: Exactly the same result. Some USB_ERR_TIMEOUT, waiting for CAM, usbus0 and in the end fails after waiting for usbus0.
Same for legacy boot and UEFI.


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## Bendodroid (Apr 16, 2021)

Deactivating USB 3.0 in BIOS makes one of the `usbusX` go away from the `Root mount waiting for....`. Not sure what to make of this.
Next idea was to boot from the IDSDM (the redundant SD-Card module) by flashing the memstick img to the primary SD-card but that doesn't make a difference.
I have also tried removing the IDSDM as that poses as a USB to the outside world afaik but still no success.


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## T-Daemon (Apr 16, 2021)

Does it help what SirDice suggested? At the Boot menu Escape to loader prompt, enter `set hw.usb.no_boot_wait=1`, then `boot` .


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## Bendodroid (Apr 16, 2021)

Nope, does not help. It just makes the `usbusX` go away, so just
`Root mount waiting for: CAM`
repeats over and over until it fails and exits to the prompt that doesn't accept keyboard input.


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## Peter Eriksson (Apr 17, 2021)

The Dell R730 (and R630 which uses the same motherboard) has had some timing issues (probably USB-related) during boot from FreeBSD 12 and onwards. What has helped on our R730xd servers is to enable verbose boot... That apparently causes enough different timing to allow the servers to boot just fine... 

It doesn't happen always though, and currently FreeBSD 12.2-RELEASE-p6 seems to boots OK on atleast one of them -  without verbose boot (I just noticed , but it might also be due to the latest Dell firmware updates (especially the latest BIOS and iDRAC) we applied to these servers. 

We are using:
BIOS 2.12.1
iDRAC 2.75.100.75


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## vmb (Apr 18, 2021)

Try a different flash drive. I keep a few old 1GB flash drives handy as I have found that drives over 2GB don't boot on some machines. Could be a 32-bit BIOS issue. Worth a try.


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## vmb (Apr 18, 2021)

Sorry, I meant 16-bit.


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