Periph Detached — FreeNAS unresponsive

[jbiz]

Hi all,

I have a FreeNAS-9.10.2-U4 machine that has been running for a couple years now. This morning I found it to be responsive to ping, but otherwise unreachable via WebGUI, SMB, or SSH. After hooking it up to a monitor, I found this:

Am I correct in thinking that the USB drive is corrupt, has failed, or is otherwise unwritable? Can I clone the USB (using dd) and then swap it out without a problem? Or should I download a fresh installation and reload the configuration from backup? Or, does this error mean something else?

Any advice is much appreciated.

Thanks!

 

[Chris Moore]

Am I correct in thinking that the USB drive is corrupt, has failed, or is otherwise unwritable?

Yes. That looks like a hard failure of the USB boot media and you will probably need a new boot device. They are not usually recoverable.

Can I clone the USB (using dd) and then swap it out without a problem?

How are you thinking to clone a device that has failed? I don't see that as a viable option.

If you were using a mirrored pair of boot devices, you might be able to try them individually to see if one of them is still working, but if you were using a single device, this is time to get a new one, reinstall FreeNAS, stop the wizard in the GUI, load the backup you made of your config db and you can be back up and running in a few minutes, unless you need to run to the store to buy a USB stick. Your data is save in the array. This is just the boot drive.

 

[jbiz]

Just in case anyone is eagerly awaiting the resolution to this issue, here is my AR report. Thanks again to Chris Moore for his very prompt response which immediately set my mind at ease.

With the assumption that the data was safe, I decided to install a fresh copy of my version of FreeNAS and restore the configuration from backup. I grabbed two USB thumb drives, loaded the FreeNAS installation media on one and popped them into a spare computer I had laying around. From there, I followed the new installation instructions listed on the FreeNAS install page.

With the FreeNAS thumb drive in hand, I went to the broken FreeNAS server, powered it off, swapped out the USB with the fresh installation, and then booted to it. I then logged into the web GUI from my workstation and restored the configuration from backup. After a little bit, it rebooted and everything was as it was before the periph destroyed problem listed above.

All in all, it was a simple, straight forward process.