FreeNAS Won't start

[titan_rw]

What the problem that I am here for help is the server recently dropped off the network (as looking on the network in Windows file explorer) so I did a hard reset by flipping off the power switch on the power supply, then flipping it back on, but it still wouldn't connect. So after I waited a while it still would not connect, so I hooked up a monitor and saw that it didn't boot up, I just saw what is in the photo. so I flipped it off and back on again the same way, but still nothing.

So you lost network access over SMB / CIFS, and figured a hard reset was the best way to fix it? Was the web interface responding? What about ssh? What about the physical console on the server? There's many things I'd check before doing an unclean shutdown like that.

And if deduplication was enabled, then on startup after any unclean shutdown, the entire dedupe table MUST fit into RAM in order to access the pool. This is why dedupe with inadequate ram is dangerous. Any unclean shutdown and you've lost the data without adding ram. "inadequate" for dedupe can vary depending on the data being stored, but I've seen recommendations as high as 20GB per TB of disk. If you had 4TB of usable disk space, that's potentially 80GB of ram.

If you can bump the ram to 16, I'd try that. If that doesn't help, an option might be sending the drives off to someone who has a server with enough ram to actually import the pool.

 

[Justin_]

So I can move the hard drives to another computer without causing damage to the RAID? Sorry somewhat new to RAID. If so, and I cant get it done at my place I can take them to work as they have a computer I built with 64 GB DDR4 ECC RAM, and that should hopefully be enough as a last ditch effort.

 

[danb35]

Yes, you can move both the drives and the boot device.

 

[Robert Trevellyan]

So I can move the hard drives to another computer without causing damage to the RAID?

Yes, as long as you didn't use any type of hardware RAID when creating the pool.

 

[Justin_]

Ok so I now have taken the HDD's and the USB boot drive to work and have them in a computer with 32GB of ram and I believe a 6 core 12 thread i7 CPU, it currently appears to be importing properly, but I was wondering how long this might take, as on my much lower specked computer at home it wouldn't take more than 5 minutes, but on this computer it has been running for over 30 minutes and it is still saying that it is importing.

 

[Sakuru]

It could take a few hours.

 

[Justin_]

Ok it started to work about 15 minutes later, thanks for the help!

 

[titan_rw]

Strongly recommended to redo the pool without deduplication.

I'm curious how many blocks there are in the dedupe tables considering your 8GB machine couldn't import the pool

If you get a chance, can you run:

Code:

zdb -U /data/zfs/zpool.cache -Dv <poolname>

And post the number next to the "Total". For example, mine shows:

Code:

Total  6.05M