Boot usb died. Help me please!

[websniper]

Last night, had a brief power outage. PC and Freenas are on UPS.

Logged into freenas and did a clean shutdown via the web GUI. Powered off PC and went back to bed. Booted Freenas and PC this morning. No Freenas.

HP Proliant MicroServer, 8 GB RAM, NO OPTICAL DRIVE(can make it happen if needed), 5 Samsung Eco 2 TB drives, RAIDZ2, ZFS.

When I attach a monitor to the HP MS, boot, it POSTS and shows all 5 drives attached, and it says there is a USB mass storage device attached. After the BIOS loads, I get a blinking white cursor on a black screen. That's it. It will stay that way. Also, the USB stick is a 4 GB USB 2.0 drive that has an access light. Access light does not come on, and I fear it's dead. I plugged it into my windows machine and it shows it in Disk Management, but it says no media. I'm not sure if that's due to the format, or the drive being bad.

I'm not 100% sure exactly which version of Freenas I'm running, but I'm positive it's 8. It's probably the first or second revision. If I dug through my downloads I could find the installer that I downloaded and update this post.

Before anyone rants, I do NOT have my data backed up(though I feel my RAID is healthy). I should know better and practice what I preach, but I'm also a bit lazy when it comes to my own stuff.... I'd prefer to restore my Freenas, but would be satisfied to recover my data.

Also, background: I'm an IT guy by trade. Windows guy though, and I'm a Freenas / Freebsd n00b. However, I can follow directions. I would be stoked if the forum can help me out here please.

Thank you.

 

[survive]

Hi websniper,

Assuming it was just you key that failed, and you are ok with reconfiguring the filer once you have you pool back all you need to do is head on down to the local computer store\WalMart\7-11 and pick up a new USB key & a 3 pack of CDRW's.

Burn the latest 8.3.0-p1 to a CDRW and boot the disk with the USB key plugged in on anything and install to the key. When prompted for the reboot once the image is written just power off the computer and walk the new key over to your microserver & boot it (be sure to confirm the boot order in the BIOS). The system should come up and import your pool so all you need to do is configure any users & services you need.

If you need to get at the old config you can always burn a freebsd boot cd (from here: http://mfsbsd.vx.sk/) mount the key & take a look under /data for the config.

-Will

 

[websniper]

If it's possible to get at my config, that would be great. I had installed Transmission daemon on the Freenas box early on, and it would be great to be able to restore all of my torrents, but it is not critical. I think I'll just work on getting the data accessible again. Is there a link to any instructions for mounting the dead USB stick in the boot CD?

Also, just to clarify, will a new install of 8.3 automatically prompt and walk me through importing my ZFS pool?

Thanks a ton for your response survive, it's making me feel slightly better about my situation.

 

[survive]

Hi websniper,

Assuming something "bad" didn't happen to your data drives your data drives should be quite safe. That's the beauty of zfs....the disk config is stored on the data drives so you can do things like move the drives from one system to another or recover from a borked USB key.

I'm not sure how you would go about restoring your plug-in jail. There is an "import plugins jail" option in the plugin service settings but it looks like you can only get there if the plugin package is already installed...if there was a way to start with a fresh key and clean config I would expect that option to exist before you have installed the plugin pbi.

edit: tke a look here: http://doc.freenas.org/index.php/Plugins#Jail_Settings

it looks like the import jail function will do what you need, but I can't simulate this for you right now.

-Will

 

[websniper]

I'll read up on the plug-ins and follow up. Had to take care of a few others things, but I'll be running out for a fresh flash this evening. I didn't wanna sacrifice a 16 or 32 GB drive I use for work to be a boot drive for my personal machine.

 

[websniper]

Survive,

Creating a freenas 8.3.0 build on new flash drive from the img file now. I also found a Freenas config backup from January 2012. Would this config (assuming it's an 8.x config) be able to be restore from the fresh load of 8.3.0 I'm writing to flash now? I'll have to look at the release notes, cause I had built a FN 7 machine some time ago as well. Any way to tell from looking at the config what version it's for?

 

[websniper]

I've created a new bootable Freenas 8.3.0 USB disk and my machine is booted up to it. I did not receive any prompts to import my ZFS pool. All the physical disks appear in the storage manager, but they do not appear to be spun up at the moment.

How do I go about importing the existing RAID Volume and ZFS pool? Auto or manual import, etc?

Thanks

 

[survive]

Hi websniper,

Give that a look:

http://doc.freenas.org/index.php/Volumes#Auto_Importing_Volumes

-Will

 

[websniper]

Pool has imported successfully. I'm just now recreating shares and I will probably use this opportunity to re-do my permissions structure. I get the following alert upon login to the GUI:

WARNING: The volume Volume1 (ZFS) status is UNKNOWN: The pool is formatted using an older on-disk format. The pool can still be used, but some features are unavailable.Upgrade the pool using 'zpool upgrade'. Once this is done, the pool will no longer be accessible on older software versions.

Do you guys suggest upgrading to the latest Zpool version? Is this upgrade/format destructive?

 

[survive]

Hi websniper,

That message is perfectly normal if you were running a pre-8.3 version of FreeNAS. It's safe to update zfs (you go from v15 to v28)....but the update is not reversable & will make your pool unreadable to older versions of FreeNAS\FreeBSD etc.

Theres nothing to be lost by letting it run a few days, but 8.3 has benn out long enough that it's probaly safe to consider the update to be "well tested".

-Will