Boot drive is lost - have two orphaned drives that I need to recover

[cruizemissile27]

Apologies for not having too many details on my system. I changed the power supply in my NAS v8 machine and all was good. Machine has two 2TB drives. It was built about 3-4 years ago and I have not really done anything with it, except merrily go along reading and writing files. OK...you can hit me with all the "you are a noob/idiot/etc" comments here! The power supply change was fine.. booted up nicely. Before I put the machine back into its home, I decided to add a couple of PSU extenders to allow me to have the PSU outside the box (the original PSU was a non standard size and my first fix was to have it outside the case... it worked). When rebooting... the NAS would try to boot, but got stuck in a boot loop.

Tried to use the USB drive and disks in another machine, but in the process of changing, I have bent the USB connector. Did not boot up or recognize the drive. At this point, I am assuming that I have lost that USB drive. Now I have two 2TB drives that I need to access.

I am a few versions behind at this point. If I rebuild a new machine on NAS v9 or later, can I "import" the old drives into the new system? I have seen reference to backing up the config before importing - but that is not an option with a fried drive. Also importing the pool, but I really don't know where I would find that given the USB is pooched.

I know it is not much to go on, but I am reaching out looking for some help (through the obvious abuse on backups etc. that I do deserve). Are there any tools I can use to pull the information off without doing the rebuild in either Windows (not likely) or Linux. I have done this before with a commercial NAS that used the XFS file structure. That was slow, but it worked! Thanks in advance for you support.

 

[garm]

To physicly kill the boot device doesn’t harm your ZFS pool. But the root cause of the initial boot loop might have (bad PSU connections)

What you need to do is to reinstall FreeNAS on something and then import your pool to your new system. Sins you don’t have a database backup you will have to configure everything from scratch, but your data is probably safe and will show up when you import the pool. All this is described in the manual.

 

[danb35]

If I rebuild a new machine on NAS v9 or later, can I "import" the old drives into the new system?

As long as you used ZFS for your storage, yes, you can. Do a fresh installation, exit out of the wizard when you first log into the web GUI, and go to Storage -> Import Volume.

 

[cruizemissile27]

To physicly kill the boot device doesn’t harm your ZFS pool. But the root cause of the initial boot loop might have (bad PSU connections)

What you need to do is to reinstall FreeNAS on something and then import your pool to your new system. Sins you don’t have a database backup you will have to configure everything from scratch, but your data is probably safe and will show up when you import the pool. All this is described in the manual.

Thanks Garm. Given the age of the installation, what would be the alternative to the ZFS file structure that would have been an option. I recall trying to set them up with a RAID strategy (for the life of me I can't recall). If an alternative structure was chosen, would the import still be an option.
I do appreciate your feedback - I've been more than a bit panicked given the contents that are on the the drive. Thanks again.

 

[cruizemissile27]

As long as you used ZFS for your storage, yes, you can. Do a fresh installation, exit out of the wizard when you first log into the web GUI, and go to Storage -> Import Volume.

As long as you used ZFS for your storage, yes, you can. Do a fresh installation, exit out of the wizard when you first log into the web GUI, and go to Storage -> Import Volume.

Thanks - sounds promising! I will give it a try. Will have to either cobble together the right gear for a new NAS or get something appropriate. I know a commercial version is recommended elsewhere, but one of my reasons for going to FreeNAS was to repurpose old equipment.

 

[danb35]

Given the age of the installation, what would be the alternative to the ZFS file structure that would have been an option.

The other option would have been UFS, which would probably require a bit of CLI-fu to recover (but should still be recoverable, presuming the disks are OK). I'd try first installing FN11 and trying the Import Volume. If that doesn't work, we can proceed from there.

 

[danb35]

I know a commercial version is recommended elsewhere

For new hardware, it's hard to beat the HPE Proliant ML10 for bang-for-buck. Add 8 GB (or more) of RAM and a boot device, and you're good to go.

 

[cruizemissile27]

Excellent. I'm assuming (hoping like hell) that the disks are healthy. Thanks for the insight into where to go next. First stop will be to try the new NAS box. Thanks again!