Lost Pools and Shares after reboot.

[Bill Y.]

Hi, I'm relatively new to FreeNAS and Linux in general. I have an old desktop computer that is definitely short on system requirements, but FreeNAS was working fine before a reboot. My Acer Aspire X1200 won't boot if external USB drives are connected. So, I have to disconnect the drives, boot up, then connect them. There are 2 issues with this, besides the obvious won't boot if connected.

First, if the drives are connected to a hub and connected all together, they don't get the same mount order, so I've taken to reconnecting them individually after it confirm that the prior drive was mounted. I did this and the result was that none of the pools recognize the existing drives. 2 of 3 of these external drives have data on them. How do I get the drives recognized as pools without ending up formatting them. I've been taking things slow as I learn this stuff, but was forced to reboot due to a bad UPS.

Second, once I get the data accessible, how can I force the mount order of the drives?

Any help would be greatly appreciated.
Bill

 

[sretalla]

how can I force the mount order of the drives?

I think you're confused here... mount order should not be important as disks will be recognized by gptid signature in a ZFS VDEV/pool.

I see you're talking about external (USB) drives... I hope not for data pools as this will put your data at risk (I'm assuming you care about your data).

You could share some more (clear) information about your hardwar to help us to help you (look at the red link at the top of this page (Forum Rules) for the expected information.

 

[Bill Y.]

I may have been confused, and now a little concerned. I'm an experimenter at heart, and know just enough Linux to be dangerous. When I saw a recent article that pointed out FreeNAS as something that you could use with an old computer, I was intrigued. So, I decided to move my 3 external USB HDDs over to FreeNAS for SMB sharing. Here are the system specs.

• AMD Athlon™ X2 Dual Core 4850e Processor.
• NVIDIA® GeForce® 8200 On-Board Graphics.
• 4GB DDR2 Memory (2 x 2GB sticks)
• 500GB Hard Drive
• 16x DVD+R/RW, DVD-RAM SuperMulti, Double-Layer Drive.
• 14-in-One Media Card Reader.

It is a small form factor desktop. The 3 USB drives are attached via a 4 port USB hub. After I got through with importing data that was on the drives that were NTFS formatted, things were running very well for my purposes. The internal HDD is the boot device and each of the external drives was setup as a single drive pool with a sub-dataset setup with ACL for the SMB shares.

What I'm seeing when I connect the hub to the computer is that the drives will mount with different device names. When setting up the pools, the device name is the identifier. For example, device da2 was setup as a drive in a Sabrent external USB drive bay. da3 and da4 were the original devices for the 2 WD My Passport Ultra drives. When I connect them all at the same time, what was da2 is now da4, what was da3 is now da2 and so forth.

With all that said, and the statement that my data is at risk if using external drives, what I really need to know is whether it will be possible to get to my data or if it is completely lost. I'm a senior on a tight budget, so wanted to use what I already had available. I'm guessing FreeNAS probably wasn't the way to go.

Appreciate any suggestions.
Bill

 

[sretalla]

4GB DDR2 Memory

This is not enough memory to run FreeNAS (8GB minimum).

You can use ZFS on Linux to get at your data on the external disks. once you install the tools and connect the disks, just use zpool import to get them mounted.

 

[Bill Y.]

Thank you!!! I can see my data. I can only import it as read-only, but I'm able to copy everything to a blank drive. I've got my eye out for a refurb with enough power and memory to fit the need and maybe try FreeNAS again. In the meantime, I have a lot of copying to do. Thanks again for your help!

Bill

 

[Heracles]

The 3 USB drives are attached via a 4 port USB hub.

That is a clear and MAJOR NO-GO!

FreeNAS must have direct access to the drives.