Disk Database Malformed & other issues

[Mohave_steve]

Hello All,

I installed Freenas 8 on a retired desktop PC to tinker with. I had no intention of placing production data on it. Well it failed today and I find that there are a few items stored on it that I would rather not lose. Any assistance in recovery would be greatly appreciated.

I was in the process of copying data to the device when it became unresponsive. I could not access via the web interface. I plugged in a local monitor & keyboard to find that the machine was locked up. I cycled power and upon restart the boot process moves so quickly that I cannot read all that goes by. I did observe the following:

A message refering to beginning of partition 4 not alligned with???

Multiple: Disk Database Malformed.

And finally I see the screen below and it cycles to the same screen repeatedly.

 

[ProtoSD]

A message refering to beginning of partition 4 not alligned with???

This is a normal message.

It's possible your Flash disk is corrupt or is failing. I'd just reflash and/or use another flash drive and then do an Auto Import. Your data on your disks should be fine.

 

[Mohave_steve]

Thank you for the suggestion. I will give it a shot. I think I originally installed 8.01-RC1 on this box. Is there any issue with installing 8.02 on a new flash disk & auto importing?

Thanks again.

 

[Mohave_steve]

I have reinstalled the original version of FreeNas on a new usb stick. It boots and I can access the GUI.

When I select "Auto Import" it prompts for "Disk" in the drop down but there ar no selections. If I click "Import Volume" instead it prompts for "Volume Name" and shows the 1.8tb disk that should be there.

Is there any means to try and pull config details from the old usb stick?

Thanks

 

[ProtoSD]

You can try putting the old stick in and mounting the old partition. I just explained how to do this in another thread. Let me see if I can find the link so I don't have to start from scratch again and I'll post back.

 

[Mohave_steve]

AWESOME!

Thank you for your assistance.

Steve

 

[ProtoSD]

Here's what I posted in the other thread, let me see if I can add any details.

Boot from the working FreeNAS, plug in the drive you want to examine and do 'gpart show'. This will list all of your partitions on all of your drives. If you're looking at the console when you plug in the drive you want to examine, the device name for that drive should show up. Use that to find your flash drive in the list from 'gpart show' and then you can find the partition names it contains, for example da0s1 or da0s2 or da1s1...

Then you need to make a mount point (some folder like /mnt/temp), then you would mount /dev/da0s1 /mnt/temp, changing the da0s1 to the partition you want to mount. If you get the wrong one, then do 'umount /mnt/temp' and try again.

• If you are looking at the console when you plug in the old disk, the device name will show up there and it'll be easier to identify it.
• Then if you do 'gpart show <device-name>' you see just the info for that disk.
• You should see 2 partitions that are about 943MB
• If you do 'ls /dev/<device-name>*' you'll see the device names for those partitions. For example 'ls /dev/da0*'
• Look for the ones that end with 's1a' or s2a' For example /dev/da1s1a
• Make a temporary mount point like this: mkdir /mnt/tmp
• Try mounting the first partition like this: mount /dev/da1s1a /mnt/tmp
• Look in the folder /mnt/tmp/data for the file freenas-v1.db
• Look at the date because in the other partition there will also be a freenas-v1.db and you want the newer one.
• Copy this one somewhere on your hard drive.
• Now do 'umount /mnt/tmp' and repeat the above with the other parition (/dev/da1s2a)
• Once you've determined which database is newer, copy it to your active FreeNAS flash drive
• First do mount -uw /
• cp your-recovered-database /data
• reboot

Things should be like they were before your crash. If not you'll probably want to do a factory restore and re-enter the settings manually.

Hope that helps!