Hi All,
First of all I'm new to freenas.
I'd be quite honest I don't know what I did exactly to mess things up. I had configured the following:-
-2 x 8TB drives (Pool mirror 1)
-2 x 500GB drives (Pool mirror 2)
my aim was to remove one of the drives from the mirror, clear the data on that drive (using windows diskpart) insert the disk back into the mirror
and the data restored from the other drive.
my first mistake was to test on 8TB drives. which take forever to test on if you have lots of data on them.
I ended up with one disk and no mirror and no way to get the data back onto the disk i removed without actually blowing away and creating a new pool again
which meant i had to copy the data from the freenas server to a 8tb usb drive, then recreate mirror (new pool) and copy the data back again.
Incase anyone tempts fate and to help others, I ended up doing the following which worked:-
1. offline one of the hdd's ( you can findout which drive, by the label on the front of the physical drive to the label under the disks section in freenas server)
2. power down the hdd caddy, if you don't have this feature, power down the freenas server
3. remove the hdd that you offline in step 1. (use a usb interface hook it up to windows and use diskpart in cmd prompt to wipe the disk) refer:-
https://www.seagate.com/au/en/support/kb/troubleshooting-gpt-protective-partition-issues-207837en/
4. insert the disk back into caddy, power on the caddy or server, if you try to online the disk it will be in unavailable status, but still in the mirror, which is a good sign:-refer unavailable_but_still_in_mirror.PNG
5. the hdd you have inserted should be in offline mode status in the pool, click on the drive and select replace, and choose the other drive in the mirror.:-
refer drive_back_online_and_resilver.PNG
I have attached couple of screenshots of the process
First of all I'm new to freenas.
I'd be quite honest I don't know what I did exactly to mess things up. I had configured the following:-
-2 x 8TB drives (Pool mirror 1)
-2 x 500GB drives (Pool mirror 2)
my aim was to remove one of the drives from the mirror, clear the data on that drive (using windows diskpart) insert the disk back into the mirror
and the data restored from the other drive.
my first mistake was to test on 8TB drives. which take forever to test on if you have lots of data on them.
I ended up with one disk and no mirror and no way to get the data back onto the disk i removed without actually blowing away and creating a new pool again
which meant i had to copy the data from the freenas server to a 8tb usb drive, then recreate mirror (new pool) and copy the data back again.
Incase anyone tempts fate and to help others, I ended up doing the following which worked:-
1. offline one of the hdd's ( you can findout which drive, by the label on the front of the physical drive to the label under the disks section in freenas server)
2. power down the hdd caddy, if you don't have this feature, power down the freenas server
3. remove the hdd that you offline in step 1. (use a usb interface hook it up to windows and use diskpart in cmd prompt to wipe the disk) refer:-
https://www.seagate.com/au/en/support/kb/troubleshooting-gpt-protective-partition-issues-207837en/
4. insert the disk back into caddy, power on the caddy or server, if you try to online the disk it will be in unavailable status, but still in the mirror, which is a good sign:-refer unavailable_but_still_in_mirror.PNG
5. the hdd you have inserted should be in offline mode status in the pool, click on the drive and select replace, and choose the other drive in the mirror.:-
refer drive_back_online_and_resilver.PNG
I have attached couple of screenshots of the process