Boot hangs at BTX loader when USB connected

[joedemo42]

Hi all,

the title basically says it. My server does not boot when my two USB drives are connected.
The hardware is a HP ProLiant Microserver N36L with 8GB RAM, 1 SSD, 5 WD20EARX internal and two external 1TB 2.5" drives. Root is on ZFS on the SSD, the WDs form a storage pool, the two externals also. My kernel was built using an unmodified GENERIC config.

joe@phobos:~ % uname -a
FreeBSD phobos.nada-net.local 10.2-STABLE FreeBSD 10.2-STABLE #1 r291337: Tue Dec  1 07:49:02 CET 2015  joe@phobos.nada-net.local:/usr/obj/usr/src/sys/GENERIC  amd64

When I connect the drives right after the BTX Loader does its thing, the system boots just fine, the three pools get mounted, etc. The USB drives do get recognized in the BIOS, however the USB Boot priority is set to low, meaning it tries to boot the hard drives first. Also, the SSD is configured as the only valid hard drive to boot from in the BIOS.

Here's what the output of BTX Loader looks like at first:

All drives recognized, everything looking good. Then all of a sudden the output of BTX Loader gets messed up and everything hangs:

At that point my only option is to disconnect the drives, reboot and boot past BTX Loader without them.

I did search for a solution, but the only thing I could turn up was to set hw.usb.no_boot_wait="1" in /boot/loader.conf. This did unfortunately not help.
After successfully booting with disconnected drives again, I verified the option was set with
sysctl hw.usb.no_boot_wait

Right now I'm out of ideas (besides the obvious one of leaving the external drives disconnected) and would be grateful for any pointers in the right direction.

 

[kpa]

I'd guess this is a BIOS bug on the machine, look for a possible BIOS update. The loader.conf(5) setting won't help because loader(8) doesn't use the setting itself, it just passes it to the kernel to be used when the kernel starts running later.

 

[joedemo42]

That's the pointer I needed. There is indeed a BIOS update available. I will update and report back. Thank you.

 

[joedemo42]

Turns out it wasn't the BIOS. Or at least it wasn't fixed in the latest update. Anyhow, for everyone else using a HP MicroServer, the latest BIOS update (15-NOV-2013) is here. This works for all the different HP MicroServers. In case you want AHCI on all ports and all BIOS options accessible, here's the BIOS I modified with AMIBCP. No guarantees, though. Don't come yelling at me if it sets your cat on fire or something. Better modify the original yourself. It's not that hard.

Regarding my problem: I guess I'll have to dig a little further.