I have the Plugable PCIe low profile USB 3 card installed in an HP N54L microserver. The card shows up fine in Windows 8 Pro but I have never attempted to but off of the card until now.
I have the FreeNAS 9.1 image on a USB 3 16GB thumb drive (ADATA) but I cannot seem to get the BIOS to recognize the USB 3 PCIe card or thumb drive. FreeNAS boots fine from this drive when installed into one of the stock USB 2.0 ports.
Any suggestions?
Hello,
Thank you for contacting us about using your USB 3.0 PCIe card to boot FreeNAS from a USB thumb drive.
There are two points at which this process can fail. First, in order to work with the PCIe card, the BIOS must have support for xHCI in order to communicate with the PCIe card during the boot process. Second, there is a handover point at which the control is transferred from the BIOS to the operating system on the USB drive. This handover has to happen in time to access the necessary drivers in the operating system on the USB.
I hope this helps.
David
Plugable Support