it finally happend. one great soldier lost. how to save the data?

diversity

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My main (I guess the NIC's) finally died. The disks are still fine I am sure and the zfs pool 99.99% sure as well.

I have new hardware waiting to have TrueNAS 12 core release to be installed.

How do I go about this as I can't screw this up. As my main had a 3 x 3TB mirror I guess I have 3 chances of pulling this off.

Could I take 1 disk (of 3) out of the died system and put it in my TrueNAS. And then import the pool? And if successfull one by one add the other 2 disks and happy camping from there?

Or is there another strategy I should follow?
 
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Why not put all 3 disks in to start? Do you have a config backup?
 

diversity

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the off site syncing process died a while back without me knowing so I can't mess this up ;( I am afraid that if something bad happens I'll lose all 3 disks and a couple weeks of data. Better to take it step by step as I am really nervous.

A config backup I think I should have yes. But I was planning to change the config anyway
 

Dan Tudora

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I am sure and the zfs pool 99.99%
hello
if is not 100% is not good
step by step is your way
stay on FreeNAS 11.3 for now
or 11.2 if you have a config file from that version
calm down and make just 1 modification at time
and verify
success
 

diversity

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hello
if is not 100% is not good
step by step is your way
stay on FreeNAS 11.3 for now
or 11.2 if you have a config file from that version
calm down and make just 1 modification at time
and verify
success
I am 99.99 % sure the zfs pool was online and in great condition last time I was able to connect to it.
Can one please show me a guide of some kind on how to go about this?
 
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You can probably just switch all the disks over to the new hardware, including your boot devices. Set the correct first boot device in bios and done.
 

diversity

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interesting approach. I will give that a go then.

But would it not be saver to try first switching 1 boot drive of the 2 over and 1 of the 3 data disks? and if it looks like it is booting and I have a crippled root and data pool then it seems to be working. I could then add a second data disk. and then the second boot drive and last step would be last data drive?
 
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I'm not sure why you think switching only portions of a mirror are safer.
 

diversity

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strikingly hypothetically pulling out a boot disk (flash usb of old old age) could make it die if I am not mistaken. If I were to loose both because I pulled out both at the same time I then have extra things to worry about.

If that logic is sound then in my believe it also applies to data disks.

I just don't want to take any risks and keep alternative options open in case a component (boot or data disk) dies in the step by step process.

And if I may be so inquisitive. Could you please tell me why you think switching all at once is not less safe?
 
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I'm not aware of removing a usb drive makes it fail. Switch all the disks and just boot it up brother. Switching one drive of a mirror makes no real sense because it's going to be importing a pool guaranteed to be unhealthy. IMHO far more of a chance for something to go wrong.
 

Dan Tudora

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interesting approach. I will give that a go then.

But would it not be saver to try first switching 1 boot drive of the 2 over and 1 of the 3 data disks? and if it looks like it is booting and I have a crippled root and data pool then it seems to be working. I could then add a second data disk. and then the second boot drive and last step would be last data drive?
1 (ONE) step at time, remember that ??
put boot drive in computer
start
boot or not ??
if boot go to next step
config network to access your GUI FreeNAS
GUI looks OK ??
if YES but see something about your pool is OK
shutdown
put/connect 1 if you want 1 of your data HDD
start and make proper boot choice in bios to start from boot pool
wait
access gui and see what it say about your pool
and after that IF ALL sound GOOD connect remaining HDD with data
success
 

diversity

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Dec 4, 2018
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I did not dare to go all in and took one boot usb flash over to the new hardware. And I got stuck real fast
pls see the image below
Edit: I removed the image as it was too large and no longer relevant.

turns out that the boot usb flash I pulled out died. I can only assume it died while pulling it out.
It's a sandisk cruzer blade from like 5 years old.

I do have good news though. I found an alternative way of getting to the data. Turns out that when I wire both igb0 and igb1 to a spare router I have laying around at least one of them is getting a DHCP lease. Even though I get all kinds of dhcp related error messages during boot.

I will now salvage the data, or at least the delta with the offsite backup and then it's happy camping
 
Last edited:

diversity

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I'd like to warn everyone here that I might have found something important to know for everyone.

I started with 2 boot usb flashed drives on my (died) main which never showed me any issues in those 5 years. The only issues I had were from a network connection perspective.

However pulling out one of them and then inserting into a new system resulted in: (this time I will post the image and keep it here)
It seems to mean that the usb drive is write protected I have found out after research and indeed when putting it back into my main freenas it started complaining about the drive being write protected.

This meant I had but 1 working boot usb drive left in my main. So i scrambled with new usb drives to replace the write protected drive. And again it resulted in a write protected usb drive.
SanDisk (perhaps aswell others) seems to hardware technically lock drives just before it internally believes it might start crashing.

I am now syncing my data but this is a bullet I dodged and everyone reading this should know about it. I will ask a moderator how to deal with this scenario as this is a topic marked as closed.
 

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