Challenge: How to restore zpool after failed boot drive?

[JD_MCn00berson]

Greetings everyone,

My situation is this:

1. I'm running FreeNAS with two 2TB drives setup as a UFS-mirrored volume.
2. I found one day that I was not able to access my share.
3. When I looked at the monitor attached to the server it said there was a kernel panic.
4. I rebooted the server and a message hung at "loading operating system".
5. I discovered that the USB drive was completely dead.
6. I installed a fresh copy of FreeNAS 9.1.1 on a a new USB drive.
7. Auto-Import was able to find see the name of my drives, but without the configuration file off of the USB drive it is unable to rebuild.

In theory, the data on the 2 drives should still be intact, the trick is being able to rebuild the configuration file so the data can be accessible again. I've scoured the interwebs looking to see if anyone else has had this problem before & it appears a few others have, but not a SINGLE one has a any sort of closure to it.

What I find hard to believe is that if the data remains untouched, why is it so hard to rebuild the configuration file? Shouldn't we just be able to answer a few questions along the lines as to how we had it setup & voila...new configuration file that matches the old one. It's not like the data is encrypted & the configuration file is some randomly generated key that unlocks it.

Anyway, sorry for the rant. Whatever light can be shed on this is greatly appreciated. Thanks in advance for any & all help.

 

[dlavigne]

The lack of a config file shouldn't make a difference in an import.

What is the output of "gmirror status" (within code tags)?

 

[cyberjock]

and the output of zpool import. You should use pastebin for the output of zpool import or it will be useless to me.

 

[JD_MCn00berson]

Sorry for the late post. It's been a crazy week. I ran the 2 commands in the shell & posted the output to pastebin. Here's the link: http://pastebin.ca/2645479

 

[cyberjock]

Oh, sorry. I didn't notice you were on UFS. I don't do UFS at all. Good luck!

 

[JD_MCn00berson]

Doh! I went with UFS since my machine only had 3GB instead of the recommended 8GB for ZFS. Is there any recommended reading I could do to:
a) figure out how to rebuild the configuration file,
b) try to understand how UFS works to see if I can mount it in a different OS & move my files out that way, or
c) migrate it from UFS to ZFS to see if I can rebuild the zpool that way?

I've got close to 400GB of data of which only 200 or so is backed up on other media. Thanks again for taking the time to read this.

 

[JD_MCn00berson]

Recent development to report: Over the weekend I've scoured the forums trying to find something that would give me resolution to this burning issue, so I can get closure...one way or another. Well to my surprise, I stumbled upon a post that mentioned some software I'd never heard before: UFS Explorer.

Hoping against hope, I went to the website (www.ufsexplorer.com) & downloaded the UFS Explorer RAID Recovery trial. After installing it on my Windows 7 machine, hooking one of my 2 mirrored (2TB) drives into an external USB enclosure I am happy to report my suspicions: all the data is still there!!! :D:D:D:D:D (I'll upload some screenshots at the end of this post).

Now the question is this: If UFS Explorer can see the unharmed data, why in the Johnny BLAZES isn't FreeNas letting me import my volume? I am willing to give up on the idea of being able to import the volume, as long as I can mount the drive & pull what I'm missing from my backup . Then I could finally start from scratch with 1 MAJOR lessoned learned: BACKUP your config file REGULARLY!!! On top of that, after all the reading from these last couple of weeks, I'm curious to set everything up right & give ZFS a go.

Can anyone help with my question (it's the one in bold;))?

 

[cyberjock]

I don't know, but I will tell you that the x86 version and UFS were yanked out of the FreeNAS last night. So you're basically on borrowed time with your configuration.