I think I messed something up... (New OS Drive question)

[roachthehuman]

So I upgraded my NAS server to a new case to accommodate some additional drives. I pretty much hooked up everything the way it was except I reinstalled the FreeNas OS onto a USB instead of an SSD I had in there. Everything installed correctly but when I went into the dashboard and checked my storage pools, all my pools are gone. Assuming then that the storage pools were saved to the old OS drive, I unplugged the USB and hooked up the SSD to the mobo and I get the message "This is a FreeNAS data disk and can not boot system. System halted"

Um.... ok. Now I'm just worried about getting my data back. I can reinstate new data pools but I need my data back and have no idea how to fix this. Please help...

 

[roachthehuman]

As most issues in life I end up fixing it as soon as I ask. So what I did was unplug every SATA cable and plugged the SSD into every port until it booted. Then I replaced the other hard drives. I can now pull the data from the drives. So I will back them up. But I will be replacing the boot drive with the USB (I need the SSD for another project and I'm only using like 2GBs of it) However for future reference, how would I go about restoring my storage pools and data with a new OS drive if say my old one failed?

 

[Heracles]

Hey Roach,

No need to worry, your pool is surely fine as of now.

Because you re-installed FreeNAS, all you need to do is to import your pool from the GUI. Do not create a new one : you import the actual one.

So reboot with your USB, go in the storage section and import your pool from there.

Should be fast and easy

 

[roachthehuman]

Awesome thanks. I've got my pool back up and running. I now see the storage pool information is written to the drive and not the OS (thank goodness) so I'm to assume if i were to rearranged the SATA cables on my mobo, I would just simply reimport the storage pool?

 

[garm]

Drives are not identified by what port they are in, as long as the pool is imported it makes very little difference where they are plugged in. Unless you have an atypically setup

 

[sretalla]

To help a bit in understanding what was going on there, it looks like your motherboard was set to use a boot order for the drives that started with a port that had a data disk on it.

If you changed the boot order in the BIOS to boot first from the FreeNAS disk, you would have booted FreeNAS with no problem (from the SSD) and your pools would have been found as before.

On the USB stick, you could just have imported the pools and/or config.

 

[roachthehuman]

Thanks everyone for your help. I have my original storage pool up and running. I'm having an issue trying to run a second storage pool. I suppose I'll just start a new thread since it is unrelated to this topic.