Overwritten zpool recovery

[ExPeacer]

Hy!
I tried Corral, but after reading the news, I want to roll back to 9.10.
I made a new install, but after that I accidentaly created a new volume instead of importing the existing one - now all data lost. Years of work, etc.
I hope anyone can help me to restore my data...
I don't know if it's help, but I backuped my Corral install into an image, wrote it to a pendrive, and booted from that - there is my old pool, but I can't bring it back to life, it's degraded...

Please, help me, I'm really sad right now...

 

[Dice]

That is an unfortunate user error :(

 

[Vito Reiter]

FreeNAS formats all the drives specified when creating a new volume. If you didn't choose all the drives there might be a glimmer of hope to restore based on the redundancy of the original pool. However, if you chose all the drives they're likely all formatted. There is a box that says something along the lines of "Partitions detected, these will be erased" or something like that. Always take your time and double check when working with important data because one click can mean everything.

 

[ExPeacer]

It's a hardware based RAID5, with all my HDD. I can't get it... There is my data in HDDs, and I can't restore that?

There is a box that says something along the lines of "Partitions detected, these will be erased" or something like that.

I just checked in my other box, and there is no box like that when you creating a new volume.

 

[Vito Reiter]

It's a hardware based RAID5, with all my HDD. I can't get it... There is my data in HDDs, and I can't restore that?



I just checked in my other box, and there is no box like that when you creating a new volume.

Well there's your problem, man. Hardware RAID is extremely discouraged with FreeNAS as ZFS needs direct access to your disks to function 100%. Also, probably why partitions weren't detected and it didn't warn you that you were destroying a pool. If you can get into the BIOS of the RAID card you are using (or list it here so I can help), try changing it to JBOD or IT mode so it just passes through as an HBA and not a RAID array.

 

[ExPeacer]

I have an LSI MegaRAID D2616. I checked it, but I only can convert it to RAID0. I don't want to remove RAID, because after that I totally lost, I know.

 

[Vito Reiter]

I'm looking into it buddy, you'll likely have to flash it to IT mode given it's a MegaRAID controller. I'll link some documentation if I can find any.

Edit: I have a 20 min drive to work in a few minutes here, just look it up while I'm away I'll get back to it once I'm available. Best I found so far is: Here

 

[Vito Reiter]

Okay, so there doesn't seem to be documentation on getting this card into a passthrough mode. I did find however that it is based on the LSI SAS2108 if you want to start there. There are flashes for that card that will allow you to pass through the disks but it's incredibly risky and could potentially damage the card itself. The first thing I would do is see if there is any way to destroy the array on the card and just have them by default picked up as individual disks. Worst case scenario, get a different card that is widely supported and known good on FreeNAS.

Edit: Also, there's a WebBIOS and CLI for that card, see if you can't find anything there.

 

[ExPeacer]

When I built the config, I want to try use my HDDs as simple disks, but I can't...
The system is a Fujitsu Primergy TX200 S7 by the way, with Intel C602 chipset, and it's support the Intel RSTe, so I can try to attach the backplane to motherboard, and use the Intel SW RAID if its help.

If you found something to reflash, send it, don't really care if it's unsafe, until there is possibility to get my data back.

 

[Vito Reiter]

Oh, if your disks were in an array, listed as one disk in FreeNAS and you made that a new volume your data is definitely gone. Disbanding them from the hardware RAID will only make it further gone. These are just recommendations to get you up and running so this issue doesn't recur.

 

[ExPeacer]

It's really sad :(
So, I tried to read files back with Photorec, and thats happened what I expected... A lot of files in pieces, and takes an eternity to merge them...
I have an idea, but if it's don't work, I'll throw out the RAID card.
So, I got an image file from the original, working system. If I extract the zpool.cache from it, can I use it to something?
How can I even extract it? I tried that some different way (OpenZFS on OS X, another FreeNAS installation, Ubuntu with ZFS), and no success...

 

[Vito Reiter]

The complexity of that data recovery process is probably beyond you. If the data is that critical you need to stop trying to recover it and give it to a professional service with experience recovering data from what you have done. Unfortunately, you had a hardware RAID that ZFS wrote 0's to and that's probably the most difficult thing to recover files from.

 

[Stux]

Well, basically you *just* need someone to construct a ZFS volume.

Don't mess with the HW raid.

Decide how valuable your unbacked up data is and contact a recovery service.