Deleted mirror please help

[cougarmaster]

Hi guy,

Been using freenas for quite sometime. Most of the services I am quite familiar with. I have several builds with large HDD and of course backups of them. I am not familiar with zfs actual workings but I have had not much problems with it in the past and most recoveries were smooth. Most of my servers are running 9.10 now.

My problem now is that I have an old
Freenas 8.3.1
Core2 duo
4GB ram
2x2TB WD Red

This system was running quite smoothly and these drives are new as the old ones which were seagate started to fail so we replaced them with these. We replaced each one with no problems. Then one day one of the WD drives failed but after checking there were no problems with the drives itself and the raid was in Degraded state. So went to replace it with the other drive in the WD it failed with gpt errors. The following was the way I did the delete of the other drive which I now regrettably did :-

1] Shutdown unplugged failed drive
2] Checked good drive data
3] Shutdown unplugged good drive plugged failed drive
4] Deleted the drive and clicked on clear data checkbox
5] Shutdown plugged good drive in
6] booted with both drives and now no pools or dataset

Is there a way to get back the pool from the good drive? Please I have no backup and I want to see if there is a small possibilty of recovering the data as the good drive however I try to zpool import the drive it says no pool available.

Tks
Eric

 

[joeschmuck]

If you have a backup of your configuration data, try this...
1) Only install your good drive, leave the bad one out.
2) Restore your backup configuration file (from when things were working).
3) Reboot and/or try to auto-import your pool.

There may be other things to try but I feel that since everyone should have a configuration backup, this is the best option to start with.

 

[SweetAndLow]

Another thing to check is what pool exist that could be imported. Running zpool import from the cli will show you what pools exist in your drives.

Sent from my Nexus 5X using Tapatalk

 

[joeschmuck]

What I believe is when the OP deleted the pool and cleared the data on the failed drive, well now the pool was of course deleted from the FreeNAS configuration. The OP doesn't have a complete pool with one failed drive so they cannot import it, or maybe it can't be imported without using the CLI. If the OP restores the configuration file, then at least they will be back to a degraded mirror and then should backup all that data immediately. Then work on adding in a replacement drive.

 

[cougarmaster]

Hi guyz,

Much appreciated for you replies. I do not have any backup for configuration (which I should go cut my wrist). At least is the data still on the good drive or also lost? I tried all zpool import commands and still cannot retrieve anything.

Tks
Eric

 

[SweetAndLow]

There wasn't any output from the zpool import command? It should have T least said no pools found I think.

Sent from my Nexus 5X using Tapatalk

 

[joeschmuck]

I replicated the scenario you listed above with the only difference being I'm using FreeNAS 9.10.1 and the results were that I could auto import the degraded mirror pool without issue. I didn't try this on FreeNAS 8.3.1 but I'm not sure why that would make a difference. Assuming you did exactly what you stated above and didn't cause any other harm in poking around, since you do have some 9.10 machines running, I'd take those two drives and place them into another machine and try to auto import the pool again. If that doesn't work then I would have to say that you did something to the drive which did contain your data. Maybe you replaced the good drive with a new hard drive, and if you still have one of the original drive untouched, you could try to import that one.

My scenario (done on ESXi):
1) Created a mirror pair and placed some data on it.
2) Powered down, removed one of the drives (moved the vmdk out of the VM folder and removed from VM).
3) Powered up (degraded pool warning because this data is in tact) and deleted the pool and erased the data on that drive.
4) Powered down, reattached the good drive (moved the vmdk file back into the VM folder and attached the file back into the VM).
5) Powered up, No pools showing, no alarms.
6) Auto Import, pool was found, completed import, degraded warning.
7) Data was present and available.

 

[cougarmaster]

Thanks for the reply joeschmuck. I did exactly as I stated above and only deleted the failed drive with the tick box to delete data and dataset. Then rebooted with both drives attached and tried to import the good drive and it could not find. I even downloaded 9.10 and tried it still won't find any pools. I thank you for taking the time to try it and letting me know. I will try to keep searching as I believe that the pool is still there with data as I did not delete it from the good drive.

Tks
Eric

 

[SweetAndLow]

Thanks for the reply joeschmuck. I did exactly as I stated above and only deleted the failed drive with the tick box to delete data and dataset. Then rebooted with both drives attached and tried to import the good drive and it could not find. I even downloaded 9.10 and tried it still won't find any pools. I thank you for taking the time to try it and letting me know. I will try to keep searching as I believe that the pool is still there with data as I did not delete it from the good drive.

Tks
Eric

You deleted all your data if you checked the box that says to delete data and dataset. Sorry but your data is probably gone.

Sent from my Nexus 5X using Tapatalk

 

[gpsguy]

Have you tried shutting it down, disconnecting the bad drive, and restarting with only the good drive?

Can you import the good drive?

Then rebooted with both drives attached and tried to import the good drive and it could not find.

 

[Stux]

You deleted all your data if you checked the box that says to delete data and dataset. Sorry but your data is probably gone.

Sent from my Nexus 5X using Tapatalk

The detach pool and delete data option?

That's the one to erase your pool.

Now, if you had split the mirror and told it NOT to erase the split drives, then those splits might be okay, but if you actually told ZFS to erase the pool, then that's probably what it's done.