Noobie with Issues

[Crocombe]

Hi Running FreeNAS-8.0.3-RELEASE-p1-x86 (9591) on a Igel thin Client. I have USB a usb drive attached. The drive is only recoginised in the port I initially set it up in, is this how it works? Also I don't seem to be able to mount a USB NTFS drive, it just hangs in autodiscovery, If I only have web access to the box how do I get to the logs?

Any suggestions would be appreciated.

Mike

 

[ProtoSD]

I would upgrade to 8.2 to begin with. You might also need to run chkdsk /r on your NTFS disk from Windows, sometimes they have errors you weren't aware of that can prevent them from mounting on FreeNAS.

There's a setting in "Advance Settings" in the FreeNAS GUI where you can enable console error messages to appear at the bottom of the GUI. If you have that enabled and click on that area, it will expand. In 8.2 you can just click on the shell icon and go to /var/log and look at messages etc.

 

[Crocombe]

Hi, update worked fine thanks and it sorted some other thing I was seeing.

a few more questions.

I am trying to mount a NTFS drive. blank drive, complete formated, it can see the drive but I get an error when LABELING the disk.

"An error occurred while labeling the disk"

It doesn't make any difference if the disk has no label and we add one or the disk has a an existing Lable ( done in windows 7 ) the label is BLACK.


Also I have the BIOS in the box booting from local drive, but if there is a USB drive plugged in, it won't boot, I assume this is in the FreeNAS config.

How do I check?

 

[ProtoSD]

The disk label makes no difference, it's just one of those ambiguous error messages. Try formatting the disk with XP, and don't label it.

It sounds like the boot order in your BIOS is wrong, you just need to get in there and look how it's set with the USB plugged in and change it to your local drive.

 

[Crocombe]

I have formatted the drive in a XP machine NTFS and no drive label. No difference, still get the same error message. Any ideas? is there a log I can see:

here is what appears in the console.

Aug 1 18:00:18 freenas kernel: ugen4.3: <JMicron> at usbus4
Aug 1 18:00:18 freenas kernel: umass1: <MSC Bulk-Only Transfer> on usbus4
Aug 1 18:00:18 freenas root: Unknown USB device: vendor 0x152d product 0x2329 bus uhub4
Aug 1 18:00:19 freenas kernel: da1 at umass-sim1 bus 1 scbus3 target 0 lun 0
Aug 1 18:00:19 freenas kernel: da1: <ST320LM0 00 HM321HI > Fixed Direct Access SCSI-2 device
Aug 1 18:00:19 freenas kernel: da1: 40.000MB/s transfers
Aug 1 18:00:19 freenas kernel: da1: 305245MB (625142448 512 byte sectors: 255H 63S/T 38913C)
Aug 1 18:02:35 freenas notifier: da1 destroyed
Aug 1 18:02:35 freenas notifier: da1 created
Aug 1 18:02:35 freenas notifier: da1 destroyed

 

[ProtoSD]

I'm out of suggestions, NTFS support has always had trouble. You could try downloading a FreeBSD live CD, boot from that and see if it will let you import your disk. It would probably give you a more verbose error, or maybe not ;)

 

[Crocombe]

Ok. I tried and formatted it as exfat and that gives a different error ( i chose EXT2FS) and I get this error... "The selected disks were not verified for this import rules"

all I want to do it mount a drive with existing data on it and be able to remove the drive and see the data on my Win 7 machine. I am not fussed about the actual format of the drive.

Any ideas?

is there any other way do do this?

 

[cyberjock]

Exfat is a file system that is only compatible with XP, Vista, and 7. It is not widely accepted and is virtually ignored outside of the Windows world. EXT2 is NOT ExFat. From your post it appears you might have thought they were the same.

I am not sure how big your hard drive is, but FAT32 should work. Of course, FAT32 has some limits in terms of partition size and file size that might not work for you.

Honestly, I think you should reconsider the configuration you are attempting to use. Using USB drives on a FreeNAS system isn't a highly recommended configuration. Things go wrong, USB drives get bumped and unplugged which causes problems with data reliability. You should consider using an internal hard drive formatted with UFS or ZFS. Why exactly are you trying to use USB and a file system that is compatible with Windows?

 

[Crocombe]

Hi
I
Thanks for the quick response. I have 1 usb drive with UFS and it works fine.

I have a concern that if the freenas server crashes and gets rebuilt, I won't be able to read the data on the usb drives... that is why I am trying other formats to ge some compatibility and comfort..

I have a number of USB drives that I have used as backup / data retention drives and I want to consolidate them so I have a drive with my files and then do a backup snapshot every few weeks.

I am beginning to think that you are correct and I might be better to start again with a mini tower and internal drives instead of a thin client imaged with FreeNAS.

 

[cyberjock]

I'm a little confused as to your response about "if" FreeNAS crashes. If it crashes (or you lost the USB key with FreeNAS installed) you simply install FreeNAS on a new USB key, upload your config file(you DO keep a backup of your config files, right?) and then auto-import your zpool.

Even if your motherboard died at the same time, all you'd have to do is install the hard drives in another motherboard, then everything else is the same as above.