Grub and other Boot Frustrations

[Krowvin]

For all that is holy, I've been having problems. Partly because i'm a rookie, partly because I haven't had to touch my server in MONTHS.

I will admit I've been committing the holy sin in fear that I knew my server wouldn't reboot. My install drive failed some months back, but having it on a mirror I thought everything would be okay. In other words, something failed and I didn't fix it as fast as I should have.

Somewhere down the line everything went to heck and back. I've been using the Sandisk Cruzer Fit 16GB since day one. I read online that several variations were made and that they weren't 100% the same size. So I got in the habit of buying them two to a batch.

Various problems up til now:
1) on a system reboot I would have to restart several times (possibly ruining the life of my pools/drives) before the drive would actually boot. I've spent the last few days trying to load freenas onto a new USB (Several actually) and upload my config. I'm at a stable point as of now. The system is running and all of the drives seem to be functional with no alerts as of yet. See photos 1 and 2

PHOTO 1

I did complete a resilver a few days ago as drive 14 was failing gloriously, all is well in that department it seems.

PHOTO 2

I WOULD LOVE to create a mirrored boot drive, however, I'm scared to even create a second boot USB at this point. I tried a few days ago when I got to this point and that failed as well. Classes start back up in a few days and I really don't have the time to be dumping it to fiddling with this at the moment. I've got a config backup, and while my server is technically production (I use it daily for more than just movies) I could restore in the event of this drive failing

For my sanity, I clicked the "Verify Install" button under System > Update

When my drive was having problems booting prior to FreeNAS telling me one of the USB drives had failed. The system would boot and sit at a grub< screen waiting for a command. Reboot a few times, and the system would load.

I'm stuck, and could really use the community's help at this point.
A) Something wrong with my database ?
B) I did a poor job updating the firmware/BIOS for my onboard RAID controller/Raid card, although it seems stable and shows the right versions
C) One of the files is corrupted and no amount of config restores will fix it
D) I'm so far out of the game/having to troubleshoot I'm missing something simple

Thank you for taking the time to read my rant, if the questions weren't clear:

1) Should I be using the Cruzer Fits (Any bad news on SanDisk for FreeNAS)?

2) Based on the above photos (I can gather more), should I be worried trying to repair something?

I'm fishing in the dark at this point. The few solid things I had were on the screen when in the height of my panic. I didn't snap a photo/screenshot.


Additional information/photos:

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[Nick2253]

When my drive was having problems booting prior to FreeNAS telling me one of the USB drives had failed. The system would boot and sit at a grub< screen waiting for a command. Reboot a few times, and the system would load.

Bad USB drives manifest themselves in various ways. This exact behavior is a pretty good indication that something is going wrong with a USB drive.

A) Something wrong with my database ? ... C) One of the files is corrupted and no amount of config restores will fix it

Depending on how complicated your setup is, it might be worth starting over.

Now, the nice thing is that your config and boot device is completely separate from your data. No matter what you do to your boot device, your data should be happy.

If you really want to start over, then I would perform the following steps:

1. Screenshots/notes on your current config.
2. Remove old thumb drive.
3. Get new thumb drive, and write FreeNAS install ISO to it.
4. Get two new thumb drives, and plug them in to the server.
5. Boot from the install thumb drive.
6. Install FreeNAS on both the thumb drives (which should automagically make a mirror).
7. Once you boot, FreeNAS may automatically import your pools, or you may have to do it manually.
8. Manually re-set up your configuration.

Once you're done, it's probably worth configuring daily backups of you config (search for a script from cyberjock), so if you run in to this behavior in the future, you'll have known-good versions of your config to fall back on.

1) Should I be using the Cruzer Fits (Any bad news on SanDisk for FreeNAS)?

I would say that SanDisk is currently the most commonly used and most commonly recommended brand of USB drives for boot devices, and Fits are the most common SanDisk model. However, if you have spare SATA ports, than most would recommend one small SSD over mirrored USB flash drives any day. An SSD is going to be much more reliable than even mirrored USBs, and if you want to go for maximum reliability, you could do mirrored SSDs. However, that's probably overkill given the likely failure rate of an SSD, and the ease of restoring from backup (given how well compartmentalized FreeNAS is).

 

[nojohnny101]

Everything @Nick2253 said is spot on. Follow his steps and start from scratch. That's the beauty of FreeNAS, your data is completely separate from your boot device so everything should be fine.