Procedure to replace a mirrored USB stick boot drive

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nigelm

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I have a FreeNAS box currently running FreeNAS-9.10.1-U4 (ec9a7d3), but originally installed with 9.3.

The boot drive is a pair of 16GB USB sticks (Kingston DataTraveler devices):-

Code:
# zpool status freenas-boot
  pool: freenas-boot
state: ONLINE
  scan: scrub repaired 0 in 0h15m with 0 errors on Sat Nov 26 16:44:31 2016
config:

	NAME											STATE	 READ WRITE CKSUM
	freenas-boot									ONLINE	   0	 0	 0
	  mirror-0									  ONLINE	   0	 0	 0
		gptid/4089c0dc-ef92-11e4-9a54-d0509964aab8  ONLINE	   0	 0	 0
		gptid/aeb7757d-f18e-11e4-bae4-d0509964aab8  ONLINE	   0	 0	 0

errors: No known data errors

and
Code:
# glabel status | egrep ' da[01]'
gptid/40791f75-ef92-11e4-9a54-d0509964aab8	 N/A  da1p1
gptid/4089c0dc-ef92-11e4-9a54-d0509964aab8	 N/A  da1p2
gptid/ae8a5555-f18e-11e4-bae4-d0509964aab8	 N/A  da0p1
gptid/aeb7757d-f18e-11e4-bae4-d0509964aab8	 N/A  da0p2

Recently I have had an email from the regular scrub of the boot disk which showed 4 checksum errors on
gptid/aeb7757d-f18e-11e4-bae4-d0509964aab8

This appears not, at present, to be a major fault, and a reboot (needed to discover which drive was which by looking at the serial numbers) has cleared the listed error.

However looking around I cannot see a procedure for replacing a failed boot drive - since there are two partitions (and some boot block data presumably) the standard ZFS mechanism for replacing a failed data drive would appear insufficient for a boot drive.

Is the recommendation always to do a new installation and restore the backed up config from the previous install?

Nigel.
 
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nigelm

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As above, the drive can be replaced using the Replace drive button when the failing drive is selected on the System > Boot > Status screen, but with a small wrinkle....

The new drive must be in place before this can be done.

So, if for example you are using a board like mine (a ASRock C2550D4I) which has two standard USB ports on the rear connectors (and a further set of USB 3 ports elsewhere which are not supported by the OS), you must remove the failing drive, replace it with the fresh stick and then do the replace operation (on the now missing original but failing drive).

[Or you could interpose a USB hub I guess, but I did not try that]
 

nigelm

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If you're running 9.10, the USB3 ports are supported.
Hmm... I'll look at that when I next have the box down for regular fan defluffing (its possible that cabling is not currently in place since those ports historically did not work).
 
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