Added new HDD's and now can't boot FreeNAS

[Travis Mara]

So last night I added two WD 4TB HDD's to a raid card in my server and after attempting to boot back up from my flash drive, I'm getting an error with GRUB. The boot process seems to stop and I get GRUB Rescue: No such Device and then a bunch of numbers, which I'm guessing is an address to a partition or one of my drives. If I run the command "ls" from the prompt, I can see all 8 of my drives, and I don't seem to see any errors. Is there a way for me to try and remedy this without losing ALL of my settings? Can I just try to run the FreeNAS 9.3 upgrade from an install USB and hopefully not have it overwrite all of my settings. Any help would be much appreciated!

 

[hugovsky]

If you re-install, you will overwrite your settings. Do you have a backup of your settings? Please post full list of hardware. Your data may still be there but you'll have to be extra-careful with what you do.

 

[Travis Mara]

I have an AMD a8 3.0 Ghz cpu with 16 GB's of RAM. Also installed are 6 1GB WD drives and 2 4GB drives. The OS was installed on a PNY 32 GB flash drive. I'm not sure of the make of the RAID card thats in there right now, but also the MB is a newer Gigabyte Ultra Performance.

And, no. I just finished setting up all of my plugins and transferring my media to the first 6 HDD's and never backed up my settings. Thats a mistake I'll never make again.

 

[hugovsky]

If you remove the 2x 4TB(not GB) and the raid card, does your system sucessfully boot?

 

[Travis Mara]

Sorry about that. I tried removing the 2 4TB drives and still had the same issue. The RAID card has been in there since the initial install with 2 of the 1TB drives connected to it already.

 

[hugovsky]

Try using a new usb stick with a new freenas install. See if it boots and then you can try to import your pool.

 

[hugovsky]

Wait... you tryed to replace the 2x 1 TB disks with 2x 4TB in one move?

 

[Travis Mara]

That should at least keep all of the media files that I have on those drives, correct? I'm sure I'll also have to set up all of my plugins again as well?

No, the RAID card has 4 SATA ports on it, 2 had the 1TB drives and the problem came up after adding the 2 4TB drives to the other two ports

 

[hugovsky]

Well, from what I can understand, you have set up a zpool using a raid card and with unsupported hardware. You have probably lost all your data.

 

[Travis Mara]

Awesome! Fortunately it was was only my movie collection and not my photos. So in theory, if I reinstall FreeNAS to another flash drive, I can try and import my zpool and try to save my data?

 

[hugovsky]

You should start by reading this:

https://forums.freenas.org/index.ph...ning-vdev-zpool-zil-and-l2arc-for-noobs.7775/

https://forums.freenas.org/index.php?threads/terminology-and-abbreviations-primer.28174/

 

[Travis Mara]

Great, thanks. I'll be going over this stuff today. Hopefully this serves as a good learning experience for me.

 

[Travis Mara]

I just wanted to check in. I read over those pdf's and was able to take away a lot of info from it. Thank you. In regards to the boot issue I was having, this morning I wanted to try re-installing the boot files to the same PNY flash drive that had the issue the other day. During the install I opted to upgrade and save the config database that was already created. Maybe today was my lucky day, but when the install completed and everything booted up, all of my plugins, settings, and media were there as if I didn't skip a beat. That said, thanks so much for the advice given on this.