SOLVED Looking for advice on boot media failure.

[nerwall]

While in the process of migrating my data to a new pool on new hard drives my boot media stopped working. Since I was already bothering to move data to a new pool with new drives I decided to better organize my datasets. While re-configuring sharing settings to reflect the changes to the location of some data the web GUI stopped responding and the network shares never came back online. I plugged a keyboard and monitor into my FreeNas box it had repeatedly printed out some write error that I did not understand, It responded when I hit enter and brought up the console configuration menu, I tried to reboot from there but then the console stopped responding. The activity LED on the boot drive was blinking so I let it be for an hour, after nothing changed for an hour I forced a reboot by holding the power button, It booted into BIOS (the second boot option after the FreeNas boot drive) and no longer recognized the boot drive. I shut down again and plugged the boot drive into my laptop. From there I scrubbed the boot pool and it found multiple checksum errors.
I have a config backup from before I made the new pool and before the most recent time I updated FreeNas. Should I burn new boot media with a clean FreeNas image and restore the old config file, or should I try to recover from the boot media? The freenas-boot pool has versioning from a much more recent update but I don't know how safe it is to just copy that to a new drive.

 

[Robert Trevellyan]

Should I burn new boot media with a clean FreeNas image and restore the old config file

Yes.

should I try to recover from the boot media

No.

 

[nerwall]

Thanks for the advice, I ended up just making a new boot disk with a clean image. Running a scrub on the damaged disk from my laptop for fun revealed only two corrupted files, but I think trying to figure out what they do and repairing them would be a waste of time.