Hi there,
I had an old version of FreeNAS running on an old repurposed gamer board for a few years. I believe it was FreeNAS 8.0.3 or 8.0.4 but it was installed in April 2012 so I don't entirely remember. The USB ports on this old board have died, so it's obviously time to replace it with a proper server board. The trouble is I was booting FreeNAS from USB. I have some backups but not as recent as I'd like, so my goal is to get it back to life long enough for a solid backup before replacing. There's no indication that there's any trouble with the data drives (still visible in bios) or the boot drive (still visible on other computers), I have config files saved from the web UI and remember my passwords so I'm somewhat hopeful.
The old board can still boot from PATA drive or from PXE. I don't have any experience with PXE so I've been trying to work the PATA angle. It can boot from SATA too of course, but all those ports are filled by data drives. The data was in raid z2 so, it should be able to withstand losing one drive, but I'd rather not upset things when I could use the PATA port.
I tried to use a Clonezilla live disc to clone the FreeNAS-USB to a PATA drive (in a USB-to-PATA dock) but that seemed to immediately fail. It's possible I had the settings wrong but I have successfully cloned SATA devices before with it, maybe someone here has a better method of cloning USB to USB. It looks like it copied the FreeNAS partition structure but none of the data. The FreeNAS source is 4 GB and the target PATA is 80 GB if that matters, but I thought it would just leave the other 76 GB unallocated.
So the next thing I'm thinking of trying is installing the latest FreeNAS, 9.3 stable, to a PATA drive and booting from there. Is it likely that a freshly installed FreeNAS will be able to recognize my old pool? Should I try to find older version 8 of FreeNAS instead, because it would need to use my older config file to see the pool again? Do I risk corrupting the data if I boot the wrong version of FreeNAS?
Then there is the PXE approach. This might be a stupid question but: Can a PXE server, linked to the network and with my FreeNAS drive connected, just serve up my existing FreeNAS to be booted from? Or does it not work that way.
And what I think is my final option: order my new server board, CPU and RAM, move it into the existing case and reconnect the data drives, and then try to boot from USB again. I don't have faith that this will work, all I can think of is connecting the drives from 0 to 5 in the same order as they are now and hoping for the best. This is what I plan to do eventually anyway, and it would be nice if the data is still there on the other side, but getting a backup before this would be ideal.
Thanks for your insights.
I had an old version of FreeNAS running on an old repurposed gamer board for a few years. I believe it was FreeNAS 8.0.3 or 8.0.4 but it was installed in April 2012 so I don't entirely remember. The USB ports on this old board have died, so it's obviously time to replace it with a proper server board. The trouble is I was booting FreeNAS from USB. I have some backups but not as recent as I'd like, so my goal is to get it back to life long enough for a solid backup before replacing. There's no indication that there's any trouble with the data drives (still visible in bios) or the boot drive (still visible on other computers), I have config files saved from the web UI and remember my passwords so I'm somewhat hopeful.
The old board can still boot from PATA drive or from PXE. I don't have any experience with PXE so I've been trying to work the PATA angle. It can boot from SATA too of course, but all those ports are filled by data drives. The data was in raid z2 so, it should be able to withstand losing one drive, but I'd rather not upset things when I could use the PATA port.
I tried to use a Clonezilla live disc to clone the FreeNAS-USB to a PATA drive (in a USB-to-PATA dock) but that seemed to immediately fail. It's possible I had the settings wrong but I have successfully cloned SATA devices before with it, maybe someone here has a better method of cloning USB to USB. It looks like it copied the FreeNAS partition structure but none of the data. The FreeNAS source is 4 GB and the target PATA is 80 GB if that matters, but I thought it would just leave the other 76 GB unallocated.
So the next thing I'm thinking of trying is installing the latest FreeNAS, 9.3 stable, to a PATA drive and booting from there. Is it likely that a freshly installed FreeNAS will be able to recognize my old pool? Should I try to find older version 8 of FreeNAS instead, because it would need to use my older config file to see the pool again? Do I risk corrupting the data if I boot the wrong version of FreeNAS?
Then there is the PXE approach. This might be a stupid question but: Can a PXE server, linked to the network and with my FreeNAS drive connected, just serve up my existing FreeNAS to be booted from? Or does it not work that way.
And what I think is my final option: order my new server board, CPU and RAM, move it into the existing case and reconnect the data drives, and then try to boot from USB again. I don't have faith that this will work, all I can think of is connecting the drives from 0 to 5 in the same order as they are now and hoping for the best. This is what I plan to do eventually anyway, and it would be nice if the data is still there on the other side, but getting a backup before this would be ideal.
Thanks for your insights.