FreeNAS guide on “burning” the FreeNAS installation.ISO file onto a USB drive creating a bootable FreeNAS USB install stick. This is not a complete FreeNAS install guide, but simply a 1st-step in the direction of getting FreeNAS onto your new DIY server. First thing is to remove the USB stick mounted INSIDE the terrmaster. It is a little USB stick that is glued to the header under the drive bay. If you do not do this, it will always try to boot it. If you want to use this space, you might need a very skinny USB like a data traveler.

This ‘how to’ guide will step you through the process of installing FreeNAS 8 to a USB memory stick using a Linux computer.
This can be a handy too if you have a system that has crashed, and you just want to get it back up and running so you can copy files off of it. You can simply plug in a USB memory stick with FreeNAS installed to it, configure it to share out one or more of the drives, and access the data from the network.
You will need a USB memory stick that is 2GB in size or larger. This example is using the 64bit version of FreeNAS, however the same will apply to the 32bit version, as long as you update the file names in the examples to suit the 32bit file names.
Install FreeNAS 8 to USB on Linux
Download the FreeNAS 8 ISO:
(Check www.freenas.org to obtain the latest version of FreeNAS)

Make a temp folder we can use to mount the ISO:

Mount the iso image to the temp folder:

Copy the compressed image from the ISO to your local filesystem:

Un-mount the ISO file:

Remove the temp folder:

Un-compress the image file:

Freenas Install Usb

Find the device name for your USB memory stick:
Use something like the following to find the device name:

This should show any reference to ‘sd*’. Make sure you get the USB memory stick device name and not a local hard disk.
It will be something like /dev/sde for example. It typically wont be /dev/sda.
Use fdisk to view the existing partition structure on the USB memory stick. This may help to determine what device is your USB stick.
Eg:

Write the FreeNAS image to the USB memory stick:
Make sure the ‘of’ (stands for Output File) parameter refers to the device name for your USB memory stick.

This will take a few minutes.
Once its completed, FreeNAS will be installed on the USB memory stick.
Unplug the USB memory stick, and test it in another computer by booting off it. If all went well, it should boot into FreeNAS, and you can start configuring it.
You may need to change the boot order, or press the ‘boot menu’ button when the PC is booting to be able to boot off the USB device.

Disable icmp ping replies on Linux

February 13, 2012

I’m on a budget, and needed a NAS for Time Machine backups. I happened to have 8GB of RAM, an old AMD Athlon X2 machine, and 7 Western Digital Caviar Green 1 TB drives to spare. I did not, however, have a CD drive, so I was stuck installing purely using the ISO and USB drives. After I assembled the machine, I ran into many headaches getting FreeNAS to actually install.

I tried burning the ISO to a USB stick using the dd command on my Mac and Ubuntu. https://typeever.amebaownd.com/posts/22866401. It wouldn’t boot. I tried using the live *.img file from FreeNAS’s site on a USB stick. It booted but I got an “Error 19: corrupt or invalid GPT table on da0” (the USB drive I was booting off of) message and was dropped to the useless mountroot prompt. I tried using UNetBootIn to burn the installer ISO to the USB stick. I got an error that the partition was invalid.

Finally, I gave up and decided to try installing FreeNAS to a USB stick inside a virtual environment, and this worked for me. I opened VMWare Fusion, created a new virtual machine from the FreeNAS installer ISO file, booted into it, attached the USB stick, forwarded the device to the VM, and installed the operating system onto it. I was then able to boot the machine off of the USB stick with no trouble.

Hope that helps anyone who’s having issues with the install process!

Oh, and to set up a Time Machine share, I followed this tutorial and it worked nicely.

Freenas Iso To Usb

Here are a few photos of the final product:

Free Nas Install Usb