Cannot attach USB Drive to Boot Pool

[SilverJS]

Hi all,

Well - as per title. Background :

I just (this Friday) started the process to install the 11.1-U6 update on my Backups box. (Believe it or not, my main box is still on 9.10...haven't gotten around to updating that yet.) For whatever reason - can't remember - I lost access to the browser that was tracking the update. When I re-launched and re-logged in via WebGUI, all seemed well, so I rebooted - but it would never complete boot. I power cycled once or twice via IPMI, and got a "couldn't find normal.mod" error on GRUB, jumping straight to GRUB rescue.

So - I re-installed U6 on one of my USB drives, and that worked fine. Upon completion of the first boot, the system started re-silvering my second USB drive, and then I got a fatal error, resilvering stopped. (Guessing that a failed or failing USB drive was the reason this all happened in the first place.)

Anyway - so far, should be fairly easy...I should be able to just identify my bad drive, detach it from the pool, physically pull it out, replace it with a new one and just Attach, right? Did all of that, and when I hit the Attach button, I get the green confirmation dialog at the top of the WebGUI (Disk Successfully Attached or what have you), but the drive just doesn't show up in the pool. It still only has the one drive, Stripe (and not Mirror, as it used to be). I tried booting up on an older environment (U5) to try - no dice.

My research has shown me that this is not an uncommon problem, but everything seems to point at the fact this was a bug that should now have been fixed...ideas?

Cheers!

P.S. - My original drives were both Kingston 16Gb, and I've tried SanDisk 16Gb and 32Gb drives as a replacement. My boot pool was getting kinda large at 85% or so capacity, but I've since whittled it down to 56% and it hasn't made a difference.

 

[dlavigne]

Anything related in /var/log/messages?

If this was a fresh install, you could save your config and repeat the fresh install, but this time select both devices to install to.

 

[Chris Moore]

P.S. - My original drives were both Kingston 16Gb, and I've tried SanDisk 16Gb and 32Gb drives as a replacement. My boot pool was getting kinda large at 85% or so capacity, but I've since whittled it down to 56% and it hasn't made a difference.

Why was your boot pool so full? Mine is around 5%. What are you storing in the boot pool to make it so full?

 

[SilverJS]

Anything related in /var/log/messages?

If this was a fresh install, you could save your config and repeat the fresh install, but this time select both devices to install to.

So here's me feeling stupid - I was thinking I only had two USB ports at the back of my Mobo, preventing me from doing that - but then, I thought of the ports at the front of the case! Duh! So, I could just put my installer USB on the case slot, and put my two future boot drives on the mobo. Probably the most elegant solution.

(I'm a little embarrassed to say this, but I'll have to do some research as to how to access the Messages file. I'll dig, read it, and report back.)

Why was your boot pool so full? Mine is around 5%. What are you storing in the boot pool to make it so full?

Your guess is as good as mine (likely much better!). I can however say that all of the later (9.10+) boot environments seemed to take up a lot of room. Deleting the 9.3 ones only freed up like 200-300 MBs - but when I started deleting the 9.10 ones, and the 11/11.1 ones, that's when the big gains appeared. But still, I've got 8 Gigs worth of stuff on my boot environment sticks, and I'm not sure why.

 

[Chris Moore]

Your guess is as good as mine (likely much better!). I can however say that all of the later (9.10+) boot environments seemed to take up a lot of room. Deleting the 9.3 ones only freed up like 200-300 MBs - but when I started deleting the 9.10 ones, and the 11/11.1 ones, that's when the big gains appeared. But still, I've got 8 Gigs worth of stuff on my boot environment sticks, and I'm not sure why.

I was a little off about the usage percentage. Still, only about 10 GB used and I have all my boot environments back to 2016.

I realize you are only using a 16 GB module, but there must be a configuration problem causing it to fill up the boot drive.
Since you are reinstalling, you might correct the problem, but my concern is that it will continue in future. You may have had the system dataset on the boot pool. This is a thing that changed (I can't remember when) but it might be the cause of the problem.
Here is the section of the documentation:
http://doc.freenas.org/11/system.html#system-dataset

You need to make sure the dataset pool is set to the storage pool and the syslog and reporting database too. Those things are constantly writing and will wear out a USB drive in no time and might account for how full the drive was.

 

[SilverJS]

I had boot environments from 2015 on mine. But still - totally valid, and appreciated. I looked, and my system dataset and syslog were both on my actual data pool (not the flash drives). Reporting database wasn't, however, so I could change that.

I think a clean reinstall, to both drives, is likely the best option.