boot mirror problem: Is there a possible fix?

[tfran1990]

Long story short. I wanted to use bigger flash drives for a bigger boot mirror.
I was advised to "replace" smaller flash drives with bigger.
Now I can only boot with all 4 flash drives in my machine.

Is there any way to recover from this without reinstalling back to the 8g FD with that config, then going the "ATTACH" route?

Can someone tell me why my FreeNAS needs the old 8g mirror attached with the 32g mirror to be functional?
I cannot find where anyone else has had this issue. Maybe we can clear up some confusion for any incident related.
I have a config from 2 months ago before I changed the boot media. Could I re insert the old boot drives and then restore to that config?

 

[dlavigne]

Easiest fix is to save your config, reinstall to the desired sticks (select them in the installer), then restore your config.

 

[Chris Moore]

There's nothing in your post to tell what the problem is. In what way does it not work?
It could be as simple as selection of the correct boot device in the BIOS / UEFI.
Can you please give some details about the kind of failure?

Sent from my SAMSUNG-SGH-I537 using Tapatalk

 

[tfran1990]

sorry, let me try to explain.

2x8g was my old freenas 10.X boot mirror.
2x32g was my 11.1U1 newest boot mirror.(i applied an update after the replacement)

my purpose was to get rid of the 8G boot mirror so i could have more space in case i needed to roll back a versions and what not. an 8 gig boot mirror doesnt allow for much storage for previous version/updates of freenas.

i used "replace" selected my new flash drive after the resilver i detached 1, then completed the process for the last flash drive.(i figured out what flash drive was what in the uc because i pulled one out and seen which side of the mirror was missing) i later found out that in order to get all the space from the new flash drive i should have attached the new drive then detached them.

after a shutdown(a month or so later)i was not able to boot. once i attached a monitor i was able to see the uefi shell when booting with the new 32g mirror.
i still had the 8g mirror untouched. when trying to boot from it ONLY i would get the gurb command line screen.

i for sure know i had the right flash drives selected(a single mirror) in bios. heck i even tried to switch each around(first boot option and second boot option vise versa).
it was then i realized that the only way i could boot an get my freenas running was to put all for of them in(the 8g mirror and the 32g mirror) its almost as if there was something on the first mirror(8G) that was not on the second mirror (32g) in order for boot.
https://gyazo.com/4ba3ade56626dd83b2c30f2b37b4ba49<--this shows all 4 connected.
https://gyazo.com/d74bbe1cda22067b160b94209dd43794<-- maybe this error could help explain something.
i hope this clears things up.

 

[ethereal]

i used to use a mirror usb for booting - when one failed - i needed to go into the m/b bios and select the other usb stick before it would boot.

just because you have a mirror doesn't mean that it will boot after a usb failure.

this is one of the reasons i moved to a single ssd (that and reliability - the usb didn't last long)

i would definitely try the the bios and select the correct usb - i'd recommend only plugging in one usb drive at a time and see which one works and which ones don't

 

[ethereal]

if you need all four to boot maybe you striped them instead of mirroring

what is the output of zpool status freenas-boot

this will tell you if it is a mirror or stripe

 

[ethereal]

Easiest fix is to save your config, reinstall to the desired sticks (select them in the installer), then restore your config.

and this is excellent advice

 

[Stux]

what is the output of zpool status freenas-boot

This.

 

[tfran1990]

if you need all four to boot maybe you striped them instead of mirroring

what is the output of zpool status freenas-boot

this will tell you if it is a mirror or stripe

i used the replace method, not the attach new and detach old
when you go to boot status there was only 2 drives showing apart of the mirror0 da1p2 and da0p2

 

[nojohnny101]

Just download your config, reinstall with what boot drives you want, then upload your config.

Done.

 

[tfran1990]

Just download your config, reinstall with what boot drives you want, then upload your config.

Done.

yes. that is what i ended up doing.
im just interested to know what actually happen, maybe help someone out who may have the same problem.

 

[nojohnny101]

im just interested to know what actually happen, maybe help someone out who may have the same problem.

Hard to know. We are not really sure what you did to get that in that predicament. That I why I think most people just recommended to save config, wipe and reload config. Faster than to try and track down the problem. And you probably don't go through this process often so you likely won't have to deal with this again anytime soon.