Installing and Upgrading FreeNAS® Before installing, it is important to remember that the FreeNAS® operating system must be installed on a separate device from the drive(s) that will hold the storage data. In other words, if you only have one disk drive you will be able to use the FreeNAS® graphical interface but won’t be able to store any data, which after all, is the whole point of a NAS system.
If you are a home user who is experimenting with FreeNAS®, you can install FreeNAS® on an inexpensive USB thumb drive and use the computer’s disk(s) for storage. This section describes the following: • • • • • •. Note FreeNAS® will only install to 64-bit hardware and the installer will not work on 32-bit hardware. The download page contains the following types of files: •.iso: this is a bootable installer that can be written to either a CD or USB flash as described in. •.GUI_Upgrade.txz: this is a compressed firmware upgrade image. If your intent is to upgrade FreeNAS®, download this file and see the section on. Each file has an associated sha256.txt file which should be used to verify the integrity of the downloaded file.
FreeNAS can breathe new life into old hardware and. FreeBSD is a full-fledged. Which you’ll need to write to the flash drive to install the OS and. Getting Started With FreeNAS 11 Install, Configure, Setup Users, Setup Shares & How Snapshots Work. - Duration: 38:29. Lawrence Systems / PC Pickup 130,143 views.
Installing and Upgrading. Home users experimenting with FreeNAS ® can install FreeNAS. The second option creates a disk the full amount of disk space.
The command you use to verify the checksum varies by operating system: • on a BSD system use the command sha256 name_of_file • on a Linux system use the command sha256sum name_of_file • on a Mac system use the command shasum -a 256 name_of_file • on a Windows or Mac system, you can also install a utility such as or The value produced by running the command should match the value of the sha256.txt file. Preparing the Media Beginning with version 9.3, FreeNAS® must be installed using a menu-driven installer, as the ZFS boot partition is created during the installation. To perform an installation, download the.iso file and write it to either a CD or a USB stick. To burn the.iso file to CD, use a CD burning utility. The command which is used to burn the.iso file to a compact flash card or USB thumbdrive depends upon the operating system.
This section demonstrates utilities for several operating systems. Note if you will be burning the installation file to a USB stick, you will need two USB slots, each with an inserted USB device, where one USB stick contains the installer and the other USB stick is selected to install into. When performing the installation, be sure to select the correct USB device to install to. In other words, you can not install FreeNAS® into the same USB stick that you boot the installer from. After installation, remove the USB stick containing the installer, and if necessary, configure the BIOS to boot from the remaining USB stick. 
Once you have written the.iso file to the installation media, make sure the boot order in the BIOS is set to boot from that device and boot the system to start the installation. Dd if=FreeNAS-9.3-RELEASE-x64.iso of=/dev/da0 bs=64k 6117+0 records in 6117+0 records out 400883712 bytes transferred in 88.706398 secs (4519220 bytes/sec) When using the dd command: • if= refers to the input file, or the name of the file to write to the device. • of= refers to the output file; in our case, the device name of the flash card or removable USB drive. You may have to increment the number in the name if it is not the first USB device.
On Linux, use /dev/sdX, where X refers to the letter of the USB device. • bs= refers to the block size. On OS X Insert the USB thumb drive and go to Launchpad ‣ Utilities ‣ Disk Utility.
Unmount any mounted partitions on the USB thumb drive. Check that the USB thumb drive has only one partition, otherwise you will get partition table errors on boot. If needed, use Disk Utility to setup one partition on the USB drive; selecting “free space” when creating the partition works fine.
Next, determine the device name of the inserted USB thumb drive. From TERMINAL, navigate to your Desktop then type this command. Diskutil list /dev/disk0 #: TYPE NAME SIZE IDENTIFIER 0: GUID_partition_scheme *500.1 GB disk0 1: EFI 209.7 MB disk0s1 2: Apple_HFS Macintosh HD 499.2 GB disk0s2 3: Apple_Boot Recovery HD 650.0 MB disk0s3 /dev/disk1 #: TYPE NAME SIZE IDENTIFIER 0: FDisk_partition_scheme *8.0 GB disk1 1: DOS_FAT_32 UNTITLED 8.0 GB disk1s1 This will show you which devices are available to the system. Locate your USB stick and record the path.
If you are not sure which path is the correct one for the USB stick, remove the device, run the command again, and compare the difference. Once you are sure of the device name, navigate to the Desktop from TERMINAL, unmount the USB stick, and use the dd command to write the image to the USB stick.
In Example 2.2b, the USB thumb drive is /dev/disk1, which is first unmounted. The dd command uses /dev/rdisk1 (note the extra r) in order to write to the raw device which is faster. When running these commands, substitute the name of the installation file and the correct path to the USB thumb drive. Example 2.2b: Using dd on an OS X System.
Note if you get the error “Resource busy” when you run the dd command, go to Applications ‣ Utilities ‣ Disk Utility, find your USB thumb drive, and click on its partitions to make sure all of them are unmounted. If you get the error “dd: /dev/disk1: Permission denied”, run the dd command by typing sudo dd if=FreeNAS-9.3-RELEASE-x64.iso of=/dev/rdisk1 bs=64k, which will prompt for your password. The dd command will take some minutes to complete.
Wait until you get a prompt back and a message that displays how long it took to write the image to the USB drive. On Windows Windows users will need to download a utility that can create a USB bootable image from the.iso file.
This section will demonstrate how to use to burn the.iso file. When downloading Win32DiskImager, download the latest version that ends in -binary.zip and use 7-Zip to unzip its executable. Once installed, launch Win32DiskImager and use its “browse” button to browse to the location of the.iso file. Insert a USB thumb drive and select its drive letter from the “Device” drop-down menu. Click the “Write” button and the image will be written to the USB thumb drive. Note if the installer does not boot, check that the installation device is listed first in the boot order in the BIOS. When booting from a CD, some motherboards may require you to connect the CD device to SATA0 (the first connector) in order to boot from CD.
If the installer stalls during bootup, double-check the SHA256 hash of the.iso file. If the hash does not match, re-download the file.
If the hash is correct, try burning the CD again at a lower speed or try writing the file to a different USB stick. Either wait for the menu to timeout or press Enter to boot into the installer. Once the media has finished booting, you will be presented with the console setup menu seen in Figure 2.3b. Figure 2.3b: FreeNAS® Console Setup Press Enter to select the default option of “1 Install/Upgrade”. The next menu, seen in Figure 2.3c, will list all available drives, including any inserted USB thumb drives which will begin with da. In this example, the user is performing a test installation using VirtualBox and has created a 8 GB virtual disk to hold the operating system.
Figure 2.3c: Selecting Which Drive to Install Into Use your arrow keys to highlight the USB, compact flash device, or virtual disk to install into and press the spacebar to select it. If you wish to mirror the boot device, arrow to the second device and press spacebar to select it as well.
After making your selections, press Enter. FreeNAS® will issue the warning seen in Figure 2.3d, reminding you to not install the operating system onto a drive that is meant for storage. Press Enter to advance to the screen shown in Figure 2.3f. Figure 2.3d: FreeNAS® Installation Warning. Note at this time, the installer does not check the size of the install media before attempting an installation. A minimum of a 8 GB device is required, but the install will appear to complete successfully on smaller devices, only to fail at boot. If you are mirroring the boot device, it is recommended to use devices of the same size; otherwise, the mirror will be limited to the size of the smallest device.