After FreeNAS Crashed...I cannot access my hard drive

[David Brenneman]

My installation of FreeNAS crashed on the computer I had it in. I only had 1 hard drive in it.
Windows CAN see it as an external but will not assign a hard drive letter to it. The partitions show up but nothing else. I also cannot afford the $150 price tag for file recovery.
Is there some way to get Windows to see the contents again?

 

[Etorix]

One single drive as a pool? Without any redundancy, ZFS is more of a liability than an asset…
Anyway, you may try with OpenZFS for Windows to recover your data, possibly importing the pool read-only. Good luck!

 

[danb35]

Is there some way to get Windows to see the contents again?

Sure: reinstall FreeNAS, restore the backup of your configuration you should have kept, and go to town. Why would you think Windows would be able to read the drive directly?

 

[pschatz100]

The file system that FreeNAS uses is not recognized by Windows. Your best bet will be to create a new FreeNAS system. You should then be able to import the disk to the new FreeNAS, and all will be well.

Most likely your data is not lost - unless you tried to reformat the drive in Windows.