SOLVED Completely dead USB boot devices

[ChrisRM]

Seems I need more advice, regrettably...

The Verbatim Store N Go USB boot devices have both failed within minutes of each other. I had some checksum warnings, so I have a pair of Sandisk Cruzer Fits to replace them but alas, upon trying to add to the boot pool, both Verbatims stopped talking. I've tried upgrading but the upgrade process fails near the end for one and the other is sitting at "random: unblocking device." for the last couple of hours, so...

Can someone point me to an appropriate method of recovering a FreeNAS, given just the pool drives and no recoverable boot drives?

thanks in advance,

Chris M

 

[Chris Moore]

I hope you backed up your config database and if you did backup your config database you're good to go just put your brand new drives in, toss the failed drives, and do a fresh install. Then load your config database and you should be set.

Sent from my SAMSUNG-SGH-I537 using Tapatalk

 

[ChrisRM]

Sounds good; I have a <thing>.tar file from a couple of weeks back from the <thing> FreeNAS; can you be a bit more specific to the install workflow as I'm nervous of zeroing out a set of working (but amnesic) drives?

thanks,

Chris M

 

[ChrisRM]

Solved.

Anyone reading this (who was in the same position as me)who has not taken a config backup will have lost so much...

This worked for me: http://www.45drives.com/wiki/index....tions_in_FreeNAS_in_the_event_of_boot_failure

Oh, and avoid Verbatim Store N Go USB sticks. Nice, small, but unreliable...

 

[Chris Moore]

Solved.

Anyone reading this (who was in the same position as me)who has not taken a config backup will have lost so much...

This worked for me: http://www.45drives.com/wiki/index....tions_in_FreeNAS_in_the_event_of_boot_failure

Oh, and avoid Verbatim Store N Go USB sticks. Nice,

We already have instructions on this site for how to do this.
If you would have looked here you would have found it.
Why would you look somewhere else.

 

[ChrisRM]

Indeed, and I spent a fretful couple of hours searching the voluminous text for something that I could use. The trouble with searching within a workflow-biased text is that, if your situation doesn't fit within that situation, it's next to impossible to find an analogue. I was grateful for your short pointer, but was left flailing within the 11.1 documentation for anything to relate to. However, a search engine helped and gave me the link that I noted.

The problem I find with the existing documentation is much the same as I've struggled with over the last 40+ years; it omits the 'Why' aspect of what it's talking about. Look at a field in the FreeNAS documentation, such as a date field, and it'll tell you the format and what it's called and that it has dates in it, but it won't tell you *why* one would enter a date there, nor what will happen if you put different dates in there.

In my case, i wasn't installing from scratch, so the existing doco was a bewildering forest of verbiage, not covering the things I needed. This is why the 'Dummies' range of books is so successful commercially, likewise the 'Missing Manual' range from O'Reily.

This isn't to disparage your most-useful help, as that pointed the way and ultimately provided the solution. Many thanks for that,

Chris M