Mini XL fails to boot after update to 11.3

[Phzi]

I attempted to update my Freenas Mini XL from 11.1 (11-stable) to 11.3-stable last night from the web interface, and after the machine rebooted, it no longer boots. I am guessing boot drive corruption. I connected via IPMI and recorded the boot process, after it gets thru BIOS, the Welcome to GRUB message is followed by random symbols. The system seems to enter a loop after about 3 minutes, and never successfully boots.

A few screenshots are attached:


Any help recovering this system would be very much appreciated.

 

[Phzi]

Okay, I installed a fresh copy of FreeNAS 11.3 on a USB and was able to import my pool.
Any chance of recovering my config?

 

[Redcoat]

Take a look at post #35 in this thread: https://www.ixsystems.com/community/threads/update-went-wrong.74084/page-2#post-514298 and subsequent postings in the thread.

This describes in detail how to get at the automatically daily-saved version of the FreeNAS configuration that by default is kept on your pool as soon as you create one. So, if you didn't save your configuration outside your FreeNAS install and you didn't move your configuration file to your boot pool, this should allow you to get the file needed to reconfigure your fresh installation.

 

[Phzi]

Thanks, Redcoat. I was also able to mount the old boot drive, so it seems the OS or grub was corrupted, but the pool itself seems intact. Trying to figure out what I need to copy and where to put it now.

 

[Phzi]

okay... so I imported the old boot volume with -R /mnt, and zpool list shows:
oldboot 14.9G 5.54G 9.34G - - - 37% 1.00x ONLINE /mnt

But... ls /mnt shows nothing under /mnt except my Store (data) volume:
root@freenas[/mnt]# ls -al
total 23
drwxr-xr-x 3 root wheel 128 Feb 2 14:12 .
drwxr-xr-x 20 root wheel 27 Feb 2 14:12 ..
-rw-r--r-- 1 root wheel 5 Feb 2 12:36 md_size
drwxr-xr-x 10 root wheel 10 May 2 2018 Store

zfs list shows:
oldboot 5.54G 8.87G 176K none
oldboot/ROOT 5.51G 8.87G 136K none
oldboot/ROOT/11.1-U2 388K 8.87G 1.09G /mnt
oldboot/ROOT/11.1-U4 7.16M 8.87G 1.10G /mnt
oldboot/ROOT/11.1-U7 15.5M 8.87G 1.01G /mnt
oldboot/ROOT/11.3-RELEASE 5.49G 8.87G 1.34G /mnt
oldboot/ROOT/Initial-Install 8K 8.87G 983M legacy
oldboot/ROOT/default 240K 8.87G 983M legacy
oldboot/grub 7.94M 8.87G 7.94M legacy

What am I missing here... ?

 

[Phzi]

I gave up and just rebuilt my config on a fresh install. Oh well.