Read-in standalone disk

[bc_0100]

Hello,

My brother who recently died had a FreeNAS setup on a home computer with two disks in a pool. Before he died, he had commented to his fiance that his computer was not booting and that he would need to set aside some time to correct it. Before he could repair it, he suddenly died. Due to the manner of death, his workstation and desk where torn apart and never reassumbled. So it's difficult to know, but I believe that he was booting from a USB flash drive, which we think bit the dust.

Since I live across the country, I couldn't take his desktop with me. But I do have both of the hard drives that he was mirroring.

1) Is there a way to read one of the disks standalone?

2) I am trying to install FreeNAS 11.1 onto a flash drive, but am running into a failure message that I cannot seem to get past. During installation, I've tried both Boot via UEFI as well as Boot via BIOS, but receive the following error:
dd: /dev/da0: Operation not permitted
The FreeNAS installation on DA0 has failed. Press enter to continue.

With all due respect, I don't really want to install FreeNAS at this time if not required. I just want to recover the data (family movies and such) that my brother had.

Thank you in advance.

Bryan.

 

[bc_0100]

I apologize, I realize that I was trying to install FreeNAS onto the flash drive installer and due to the nature of deleting and recreating the partition, that was the cause of my issue.

 

[Redcoat]

Bryan, sorry for your loss.

I gather that you now are positioned to install FreeNAS onto a "fresh" USB. Are the two HDD's in the computer you are working on? Are there any other HDD's in that computer?

 

[bc_0100]

Redcoat,

Thanks, I appreciate it.

There were actually four drives, two 500GB's and two 2TB's. I am guessing that he might have had two sets of mirrors.

I am trying to install FreeNAS now on some other hard drive as an attempt to read in the data.

 

[gpsguy]

Please keep the 4 drives together. Even if it's two sets of mirrors, we don't know whether they are in one pool or in separate pools.

Do you have a second flash drive that you could install FreeNAS on, ie. boot from the installer and install to the second flash drive.

 

[bc_0100]

gpsguy,

Good point, you're right, I don't actually know.

This box only has 4 SATA ports, so I'll have to locate another flash drive and install FreeNAS.

I was able to accomplish installing it initially onto a spare drive, but now see that I need to move to a flash. Meanwhile, I was able to read at least one of the drives (imported the volume, shared it, found some data). So that's a great start.

To your point, I don't know what pools / configuration that he had this in. Speaking of, I've tried also adding both of the 500GB drives and importing the disk and volume, but thus far have been unsuccessful.

I have to run at the moment, but later tonight or so I hope to reinstall FreeNAS onto a flash drive and then connect all four disks. Thanks to Redcoat, I am going to try zpool status in CLI.

If anyone has any other advise, I welcome it. I have no idea how he has this configuration setup.

Thanks again in advance!

 

[bc_0100]

Hello,

I was able to re-install FreeNAS on a flash drive and then connect all four drives (two 500GB's and two 2TB's). The best that I can tell, I think that the two 2TB's are mirrored, I was able to access them by doing "import disk". Next, I was able to run "import disk" on one of the two 500's. I am not exactly sure where that data is/went per say. But the last 500, when I try to import it, it fails as follows:

Code:

Import of Volume /dev/ada3s1 Failed.

Reason: Mount failed 12 -> b'', b"NTFS signature is missing.\nFailed to mount '/dev/ada3s1': Invalid argument\nThe device '/dev/ada3s1' doesn't seem to have a valid NTFS.\nMaybe the wrong device is used? Or the whole disk instead of a\npartition (e.g. /dev/sda, not /dev/sda1)? Or the other way around?\n"

When I run zpool status from CLI, here is the output:

Code:

Shell
 state: ONLINE																
status: Some supported features are not enabled on the pool. The pool can	  
		still be used, but some features are unavailable.					  
action: Enable all features using 'zpool upgrade'. Once this is done,		  
		the pool may no longer be accessible by software that does not support
		the features. See zpool-features(7) for details.						
  scan: resilvered 13.3M in 0 days 00:00:01 with 0 errors on Sat Jan 20 12:50:48
 2018																		  
config:																		
																				
		NAME											STATE	 READ WRITE CKS
UM																			
		server										  ONLINE	   0	 0	
 0																			
		  mirror-0									  ONLINE	   0	 0	
 0																			
			gptid/ff8a4760-db68-11e6-a038-00306772ba04  ONLINE	   0	 0	
 0																			
			gptid/0142ac29-db69-11e6-a038-00306772ba04  ONLINE	   0	 0	
 0																			
																				
errors: No known data errors

Thoughts on the location of the disk import? Thoughts on the disk import? Thank you in advance for any and all support.

 

[Redcoat]

Bryan, glad things are working out for you on the 2TB's - yes they are a mirror. The GUI view will show you the structure. Try MC (Midnight Commander) from the CLI for a look at the files. Look at the MC website for help on it.

Take a look here for possible lead on the NTFS error.