Help me determine how far out in the weeds I am

[toddah]

Ok so I have been running Freenas for years, I have a Microsoft board running (4) 1Tb disks running as raid 5 ZFS booting from a USB thumb drive. We have sold our house and moved and during this insanity the Boot thumb drive came up missing. So I got another but when resetting up the system I realized I had a single disk that had died completely and with my email change I never got the notices of degraded system.
So here I am with TONS of stuff on my arrays no boot USB and 1 dead disk drive out of the 4.
I am looking for PROVEN guidance on how to go about recovering from this mess I have gotten myself into.
I can not find my external backup system so I am desperate. I got a new matching disk to replace the dead disk but am not quite sure how to proceed with the recovery (if possible)
can anyone lend some advice.
I have lost disks before and successfully replaced them and resilvered the system but this is a combination of events I have never facesd

 

[Jessep]

First calm down, you are way more likely to make a mistake or miss something when wound up. It would be better to leave it for another day than make things worse.

If only one drive is bad and you are using a ZFS RaidZ1 you have an excellent chance to recover fully. If you have full recent backups then you are fine.

Post full system specs and how it's setup.

The basics are install FreeNAS onto a new USB/SSD drive, preferably the same FreeNAS version you used before.
Attempt to import the Pool in the GUI, the manual will cover this.
If that works and shows pool online in a degraded state it should be replace bad drive and let it resilver.

If that doesn't work as intended you will want to post back further information.

Absolute worst case is you lost your data. No one died. You can learn from it and move on with better practices so it wont happen again. I can guarantee you that no old timer on this board hasn't lost data at some point.

 

[toadman]

I am looking for PROVEN guidance on how to go about recovering from this mess I have gotten myself into.

What did your search of the forum suggest to you is the path forward?

 

[toddah]

I would think the path forward is to reinstall 9.2 on a thumb drive and then attempt to import the pool and see if it will import as degraded because it is missing 1 of the 4 disks. Then replace the bad disk and resilver the array.
I was trying to make sure I did not do anything that might damage or modify the 3 remaining disks by going off half cocked and regretting it later.
More looking for reassurance the import would work with only 3 of the 4 drives on a new 9.2 install.

 

[toddah]

I am currently attempting to image the 3 remaining drives so I can recover in the event I make a mistake or misunderstood some part of the import process.

 

[sretalla]

More looking for reassurance the import would work with only 3 of the 4 drives on a new 9.2 install.

You should be able to import with the -f switch. Assuming the 3 remaining disks are healthy, it will operate in degraded status.

 

[toddah]

Every time I run an import Volume I get screens and screens of text flying y on the terminal screen and it ends with a reboot. Os there a log file I can investigate to see if I can see what the problem is?
I only have 4 gig of memory could that be an issue?
I have looked at the disks with ZFS recovery and it sees the volumes by name but I bought a 4 terabyte disk to image the 3 disks remaining so I could work with the images but all of my windows machines will only recognize 2 gig on the disk. I think it my sata to USB adapter because it works the same on 4 different windows boxes including the latest 1909 update package.
I am frustrated but determined to exhaust every last solution I can find.

 

[sretalla]

I only have 4 gig of memory could that be an issue?

That will certainly not be a helpful thing. It may or may not be the specific cause of your issue.

Logs are under /var/log/

What you are probably seeing is a memory dump as the system has a kernel panic for some reason. This can be hardware or some other factor like a corrupted system file.