FreeNAS can no longer see disks

[blahblah]

First, please escuse my ignorance. I did do a search but wasn't sure what elements of this were the pertinent ones to search for. If there is a suitable tutorial/explanation already in existance I'm happy to follow it, I don't want to waste anyone's time.

The basic problem is that FreeNAS can no longer see 2 disks or the volumes that were set up on them, although the mountpoints are still in the FreeNAS interface.

This is the context which might explain it. (Before anyone points out that this is not a smart way to deal with NAS, I'd like to explain that I do know that and it's a long story about why it all happened. It's not a series of events I would ever choose to repeat, so please don't bother passing judgement if you don't want to help.)

• Setup FreeNAS-9.2.1-RELEASE-x64 on a HP ProLiant MicroServer N54L with a couple of old disks from external hard drives - no RAID, etc. just one simple volume per disk.
• Repurposed machine to run XBMC adding a low-end graphics card (removed and kept the FreeNAS USB stick safe).
• Removed XBMC (installed on a seperate USB stick), reinserted FreeNAS USB stick and booted machine.
• FreeNAS displays system alert 'WARNING: The volume Small (ZFS) status is UNKNOWN'
• Both volumes have the status 'UNKNOWN' and the View Disks tab displays nothing at all.

Is there anyway to recover these volumes to FreeNAS, or failing that just access the data using any other OS/tool so it can be copied elsewhere?

Thanks for taking the time to read this. I'm happy to post any logs, screenshots, etc which may be useful.

 

[danb35]

Let's try to get a better picture of what's going on with your machine. Go to the shell (or better yet, ssh in to your server), and give the output of the following commands:

• camcontrol devlist
• zpool status
• zpool import

Are you still running 9.2.1? How much RAM is in your machine?

 

[blahblah]

Let's try to get a better picture of what's going on with your machine. Go to the shell (or better yet, ssh in to your server), and give the output of the following commands:

• camcontrol devlist
• zpool status
• zpool import

Are you still running 9.2.1? How much RAM is in your machine?

I am still running 9.2.1 and the machine has 2GB of RAM (after reading around at the time it seemed like that was enough for very light home usage with quite small amounts of data)

Code:

# camcontrol devlist
<ATAPI iHAS124 B AL0R> at scbus4 target 1 lun 0 (pass0,cd0)
<Integral Courier PMAP> at scbus7 target 0 lun 0 (da0,pass1)

Code:

# zpool status
no pools available

Code:

# zpool import
#

(that is to say there is no output from that command)

 

[danb35]

Even under 9.2.1, 2 GB of RAM was too little to use with ZFS--you should plan to upgrade the machine to at least 4 GB, and really 8 GB is a practical minimum. But that's not the problem you're encountering right now--the OS just isn't seeing your disks at all. Does the BIOS see them? Have you checked the power connections and the SATA cables? You might want to try replacing the SATA cables, plugging them into different SATA ports on your motherboard, and/or plugging the disks into a different computer to see if they're recognized.

 

[blahblah]

Like I said, I can't really justify any of the stuff that I did and wouldn't do it again.

Good point though, I had made some assumptions about the drives. It just seemed unlikely that they were both working last time I was running FreeNAS and they both died when I went to run it again some time later. I'll run the sanity checks.