F2-221 BIOS corruption?

Initialization of newly purchased TNAS or re-installation of your TNAS
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rusanovd
Posts: 8
Joined: 26 Oct 2021, 02:27

F2-221 BIOS corruption?

Post by rusanovd »

Hello,

Back in 2019 I decided it was time for me to get a NAS, so I purchased an F2-221 - great form factor, low power consumption, standard x86_64 hardware, even an HDMI port...
I tried TOS3 (the current version back then), but it did not meet my requirements. I decided I would not use FreeNAS on a device without ECC memory, so I replaced the internal USB drive with a small USB SSD and installed OpenMediaVault with 2 old laptop HDDs as data drives. Unfortunately I do not remember if I used UEFI or Legacy boot when I set it up...

After 2 years of playing with OMV, Nextcloud and other containerized apps I decided it was time for the NAS to be "moved into production".
I bought 2 x 4TB Seagate IronWolf Pro, wiped OMV, decided to give TOS 4.2.15 a shot, still chose OMV over TOS and tried to install OMV again. This is where the problems started:
- Legacy boot was hit or miss - OMV installs, but does not boot (black screen)
- With UEFI boot the OS does not even install - the system boots from the installation USB, everything works fine, until the installation of grub fails. I've tried OMV5 (multiple releases), Debian 10, Manjaro, Windows 10 - all of them fail at installing the bootloader, even if I try to install to a HDD, connected to a SATA port.

I tried clearing CMOS, but then on boot I was getting "CMOS checksum error", which did not clear after loading defaults or configuring BIOS to my taste. At some point the error would clear, but I could not find out what caused it to clear.
Today I removed the CMOS battery and about 10-20 minutes later I installed a new one (turned out the old one was getting weak). The CMOS errors disappeared, but I am still unable to install an UEFI-booting OS.

At some point I connected the USB SSD to an Intel-based laptop with UEFI boot and installed OMV to the said SSD. Then I put the SSD back into the NAS and it booted fine.

TOS still works with the default BIOS settings (I even upgraded to 4.2.16, although it did not work the first time), but it is not my cup of tea...

While I did find a way around my issue, it does not seem like a bulletproof plan in case something goes wrong. ReaR backup of the SSD works fine, but the restore fails, again due to bootloader errors. I have a CloneZilla backup too, but i do not have another USB stick with the same size to test the restore on...


TL;DR - it seems there is a BIOS corruption, probably caused by a low battery or just a bug in it. My device uses:

[ +0.000000] NX (Execute Disable) protection: active
[ +0.000000] efi: EFI v2.50 by American Megatrends
[ +0.000000] efi: ESRT=0x5decc918 ACPI=0x5db88000 ACPI 2.0=0x5db88000 SMBIOS=0xf05e0 SMBIOS 3.0=0xf0600 MPS=0xfc9e0
[ +0.000000] secureboot: Secure boot could not be determined (mode 0)
[ +0.000000] SMBIOS 3.0.0 present.
[ +0.000000] DMI: retsamarret 000-F2221-FBA002-0001/Default string, BIOS 5.12 10/19/2018


Since day one every boot has generated the following messages, both in OMV and TOS:

microcode: microcode updated early to revision 0x44, date = 2020-10-23
....
[ +0.002476] smpboot: CPU0: Intel(R) Celeron(R) CPU J3355 @ 2.00GHz (family: 0x6, model: 0x5c, stepping: 0x9)
[ +0.000208] mce: [Hardware Error]: Machine check events logged
[ +0.000003] mce: [Hardware Error]: CPU 0: Machine Check: 0 Bank 4: e600000000020408
[ +0.000008] mce: [Hardware Error]: TSC 0 ADDR fef13dc0
[ +0.000005] mce: [Hardware Error]: PROCESSOR 0:506c9 TIME 1635185972 SOCKET 0 APIC 0 microcode 44


They do not seem to affect the way the NAS works, but some forums recommend a BIOS upgrade (if such is available) to fix them.

Is there a 100% sure way to make sure CMOS is properly cleared? Is there an updated BIOS for this board? I was hoping newer BIOS versions would arrive with some of the TOS upgrades, but for now this has not been the case.
Thanks in advance.
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titanrx8
Posts: 222
Joined: 17 Jul 2020, 06:17

Re: F2-221 BIOS corruption?

Post by titanrx8 »

Are those error messages coming up on an HDMI connected monitor?

The only time I ever saw system error messages was when I had an HDMI monitor to verify that the original boot USB had gone bad. No issues with TOS since building the new boot USB on a high quality fit USB.

You're worse than me with the testing prior to production. I've been testing x.15 for 5 months on my backup system. My production system is running x.8 without issues and I'd rather not mess with it.
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rusanovd
Posts: 8
Joined: 26 Oct 2021, 02:27

Re: F2-221 BIOS corruption?

Post by rusanovd »

Hi, the "CMOS checksum error" is seen at boot on a connected display. The messages I pasted in Italic were copied from dmesg.
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