SUCCESS AT LAST!!! I've finally modded my inherited iomega nas device (4x 120GB) into a FreeNAS system after the original system (Windows Server 2000 Embedded) died on it.
It took me quite some time but after a little bit of an 'ahah' and 'duh' It is finally up and running.
I still have an annoying issue with my IRQ11 giving some issues but I've got a fix for that in the works. For now I just SSH into the device if I need console-like access for shutdowns etc. Otherwise I use the very easy to use Web Interface that comes with FreeNAS in order to perform all of my RAID configurations and what not. This is how I did it:
1. Worked very hard to find out that its very hard to find a way to boot a system off of USB that does not have the function built in automatically.
2. Found a floppy program called 'PlopBoot' easily downloadable from here:
http://www.plop.at/en/bootmanager.html that assisted me with this issue. (the iomega device doesn't have an open slot for the optical drive to be plugged in without always taking away one of the HDD ports).
3. I wrote PlopBoot to my floppy drive using 'RawWrite' easily downloadable here:
http://www.chrysocome.net/rawwrite. I used the disk for a while to try and install some OS's via USB and successfully had DSL running and Windows Server 2003 only to find out that the CPU was failing...
4. Before I realized the CPU was failing I went ahead and performed a test on all of the hard drives using my trusty 'Hitachi Drive Fitness Test' easily downloadable from:
http://www.hitachigst.com/support/downloads/
5. All of the HDD's came back working fine and in the meantime I found another processor of the same socket type (unfortunately about 300Mhz slower, but a NAS doesn't need much, especially for a non-business setup). I'll eventually hit up the local Computers Plus and rummage through their scrap for a faster one of the same socket.
6. I tried using 'UNetbootin' downloadable from here:
http://unetbootin.sourceforge.net/ but when I attempted (multiple times) to install the FreeNAS image to a flash device it wouldn't run.
**As a side note. This program (UNetbootin) is an awesome application especially because it can downloaded the newest versions of many Linux distributions to make building a USB bootable or even CD/DVD bootable Linux media very easy. It was just not applicable for this particular setup.
7. I eventually used another system that did have an optical drive and used it to do the installation of FreeNAS to the USB device.
8. The USB ended up having some configuration conflicts because I switched which machine it was plugged into (machine X and then put it into the iomega) but once it booted up it refreshed everything to match what was available.
9. Once the system booted up via my PlopBoot floppy and then the USB FreeNAS I went through the standard configurations and utilized all of the storage space for one large CIFS share.<br>
**Legally Archived Video Library Here We Come**
My cat was very unsupportive of how long it took...
