Hardware failure

[trackstar2000]

My second drive suddenly cannot been seen by the motherboard/OS. I thought it was dead but when I connected to another machine, I could see it in the BIOS.

I need to recover data on this drive since it has very important VMware machines.

1) Do I boot this drive as a slavery drive into a Windows machine and grab any files I can from it.
2) Same as above in step 1 but use a Linux machine
3) Build a new FreeNAS box with latest version and attach the drive and import it. My current box runs version FreeNAS-9.2.1.7

System breakdown:
Flash USB drive - FreeNAS OS
1st drive - data
2nd drive - VM machines (having issues now).

Thanks for you suggestion.

TT

 

[Stux]

No redundancy? no backup?

is/was it ZFS formatted?

 

[trackstar2000]

No redundancy? no backup?

is/was it ZFS formatted?

ZFS. I had backup for a short time but moved home and it was a mess :(. I hope I can recover this one.

 

[pirateghost]

Windows won't know what to do with a ZFS drive. It can't read it.

 

[Mirfster]

Based on what I gather, it does not bode well for you... Seems like you had no redundancy and even if the drive can been seen by the BIOS that doesn't mean it is fully functional.

Wishing the best for you, but find it highly doubtful you will recover the data if that drive is done.

 

[Robert Trevellyan]

With a single-disk vdev, I think your only hope is to attempt to clone the faulty drive using something like GNU ddrescue. If that works, you could then try to import the clone.

In some situations photorec can recover loose files, but I doubt that will work with VM images.

 

[trackstar2000]

Since the FreeNAS OS is on the USB, can I carry it to the new hardware box that is able to see the supposedly bad drive. Then once the OS is booted, attempt an import?

Can FreeNAS OS in general be moved from one hardware box to another?

 

[pirateghost]

You can move FreeNAS around from hardware to hardware just fine. And you shouldn't have to import anything if you just pop your OS and data drives in another box

 

[Robert Trevellyan]

Since the FreeNAS OS is on the USB, can I carry it to the new hardware box that is able to see the supposedly bad drive. Then once the OS is booted, attempt an import?

Technically, yes, but if the drive is failing, every time it spins up might be the last. That's why I would clone it first. Then you should really work from a copy of the clone, so if something goes wrong, you can make another copy of the clone.

On the other hand, if you're really confident the problem is with the original motherboard, just remove the 'data' drive and switch the connectors.