HELP - How to replace a failing boot drive when mirrored

[adrianwi]

I was wondering if there was a better way to do this, after a trial and error attempt at replacing a failing boot drive.

I have 2 identical SanDisk Cruzer Blade 16GB USB sticks connected to the motherboard and about a month ago got a few error messages relating to errors on DA8.

I ordered a replacement, but by the time it arrived everything seemed to settle down and after a scrub the system reported everything was fine. Earlier this week I started to see similar messages, again on DA8 so thought I'd replace it with the one I had on standby.

Problem is, I didn't know which was DA8 and which was DA7!

I shut down and removed one of the USB sticks and rebooted without problem, so wrongly assumed I'd removed DA8, even though the system reported that DA7 was in the machine. Shut down again and inserted the new USB stick and rebooted. Used the Replace button to add the new stick and after resilvering I was getting the same errors.

Shut down and removed the other USB stick and replaced the one I'd removed and rebooted, again without problem. Again DA7 reported as in the machine, so Replaced and it's currently resilvering, hopefully with everything happy afterward.

What should I have done different, if anything, and how would I label them up to help with a similar issue in the future?

 

[Robert Trevellyan]

the system reported that DA7 was in the machine

The difficulty is that *nix systems tend to allocate device numbers sequentially, so if da7 and da8 are the last two devices and you removed one of them, you will most likely always see only da7 when you reboot.

 

[adrianwi]

Agggghhhhhh!

I thought everything had worked fine, as the resilver completed and pool status showed everything was fine.

Shutdown to put the side back on the case and moved back into place and now the thing won't boot! Tried to have a look in the BIOS and couldn't remember the damn password (school boy error, I know) so reset the BIOS and reset the boot order to just the SanDisk Cruzer Blade 1.27 but it still won't boot with the error:

Code:

Reboot and Select proper Boot device
or Insert Boot Media in selected Boot device and press a key

Need some sleep and don't know what else to try other than installing FreeNAS again onto a USB stick.

Any ideas of what to check?

UPDATE - I struggle to sleep with things like this bugging my brain, so I created a FreeNAS install USB and that booted and then updated one of the SanDisk Cruzers. Rebooted and I'm back in to the GUI and everything looks fine, or at least Plex and ownCloud are running fine.

Only other thing I did was move the CPU fan from the FANA jumper to the FAN1 jumper, and moved the fan that was on that to the FAN4 jumper, but can't see how that would have interfered with things.

Anyway, panic over :D Time for bed....