Recover data freenas & esxi 5.1

[Panagiotis]

Hi,

Before i start let me tell you 2 things.
1. I know freenas & virtualisation is a bad thing and not recommended
2. I have little to none linux knowledge

Having said that, i move to the problem.

I have an esxi server at home that runs a few things (mikrotik, proxy etc). I had 2x1tb spare drives and thought i would give Freenas a try. Since the pc is dual core 4gb ram, i went with ufs and (i guess raid0 or the freenas equivalent)

I mounted the drives using this guide http://mogsub.com/2013/03/27/building-a-nas-part-2-installing-esxi-and-freenas/

Everything went great very happy for 2-3 months no problems at all

Due to some weird kvm - usb mouse bios setting incompatibility, i had to reset the esxi bios. After that (and having reconfigured all the bios settings as before), freenas did not recognize the disks size and i could not access the data. Deleting the volume and auto-reimporting reports The selected disks were not verified for this import rules

in esxi
fdisk -l

Disk /dev/disks/t10.ATA_____WDC_WD10EADS2D11M2B1__________________________WD2DWCAV54002750: 1000.2 GB, 1000204886016 bytes
255 heads, 63 sectors/track, 121601 cylinders
Units = cylinders of 16065 * 512 = 8225280 bytes

Disk /dev/disks/t10.ATA_____WDC_WD10EADS2D11M2B1__________________________WD2DWCAV54002750 doesn't contain a valid partition table

Disk /dev/disks/t10.ATA_____WDC_WD10EADS2D11M2B1__________________________WD2DWCAV53956395: 1000.2 GB, 1000203804160 bytes
255 heads, 63 sectors/track, 121601 cylinders
Units = cylinders of 16065 * 512 = 8225280 bytes


Disk /dev/disks/t10.ATA_____WDC_WD10EADS2D11M2B1__________________________WD2DWCAV53956395 doesn't contain a valid partition table
Any help on recovering the data?

 

[Whattteva]

Due to some weird kvm - usb mouse bios setting incompatibility, i had to reset the esxi bios. After that (and having reconfigured all the bios settings as before), freenas did not recognize the disks size and i could not access the data. Deleting the volume and auto-reimporting reports The selected disks were not verified for this import rules

in esxi
fdisk -l

Disk /dev/disks/t10.ATA_____WDC_WD10EADS2D11M2B1__________________________WD2DWCAV54002750: 1000.2 GB, 1000204886016 bytes
255 heads, 63 sectors/track, 121601 cylinders
Units = cylinders of 16065 * 512 = 8225280 bytes

Disk /dev/disks/t10.ATA_____WDC_WD10EADS2D11M2B1__________________________WD2DWCAV54002750 doesn't contain a valid partition table

Disk /dev/disks/t10.ATA_____WDC_WD10EADS2D11M2B1__________________________WD2DWCAV53956395: 1000.2 GB, 1000203804160 bytes
255 heads, 63 sectors/track, 121601 cylinders
Units = cylinders of 16065 * 512 = 8225280 bytes


Disk /dev/disks/t10.ATA_____WDC_WD10EADS2D11M2B1__________________________WD2DWCAV53956395 doesn't contain a valid partition table
Any help on recovering the data?

I hope by "Deleting the volume" you really meant unmounting it and not destroying the partition table cause if you did the latter, I think your chances are pretty slim.

 

[Panagiotis]

Yes i was very careful, only unmounted it, did not check the delete

 

[Panagiotis]

If anyone is willing to take a look please pm and i can give direct ssh access

 

[Panagiotis]

Anyone?

 

[cyberjock]

Yeah,I wouldn't expect much of a response(as you have seen). Most of us know when there's little chance of recovery. Also virtually all of us are volunteers so we don't generally do recovery. You are kind of on your own to figure out your dilemma and fix it, or call one of those data recovery experts and let them have a go at it.

 

[Panagiotis]

The thing is, the disks are not damaged/formatted/altered. If there is something wrong i guess it has to be with the partition table. If this is not the best case scenario for recovery, i don't know what is. Anyway thank you all for your time

 

[leenux_tux]

It would be useful if you could provide information on your install procedure for ESXi and how you configured the hard drives.

Looking at the information you have already provided it seems that the command "fdisk" from the ESXi command line either thinks the file system is trashed (bad) or, it's possible that it doesn't understand the file system on the disk (not as bad).

You said you added the two drives in at a later date ? How did you add these drives in to ESXi and how were they allocated to the FreeNAS Virtual Machine ?

 

[Panagiotis]

I physically added the disks on the machine and followed the instructions on my first post http://mogsub.com/2013/03/27/building-a-nas-part-2-installing-esxi-and-freenas/ . From what i understand it creates a file that point to the drive, so esxi thinks that the drive is a virtual disk From there Freenas detected the disks and i added them as an array ufs.

 

[leenux_tux]

So the disks have not been added to the VMWare storage pool but have been added as physical drives so they can be accessed as physical drives and not VMDK's ?

 

[Panagiotis]

Yes. This is the advised way to go in this scenario. The author of the article even tried moving the disk to a linux instalation and all the files where intact.

 

[leenux_tux]

OK, I'm not familiar with the way you have ESXi/FreeNAS setup and I don't have my ESXi/FreeNAS system setup that way, however, I have an idea.

From the information you have provided there is a possibility that those two drives which "fdisk" doesn't understand may still have a valid UFS "pool" on them, how to get to them is the question.

What I would try is the following...

• Shutdown the ESXi server.
• Disconnect the drives that form the ESXi install, both data and power cables; your ESXi install needs to be protected. What you want to do is to only have the two drives that make up the FreeNAS UFS files system attached.
• Get hold of a 4GB USB drive, download FreeNAS and install it to the USB drive.
• Boot up your newly installed system from the USB drive.
• From the FreeNAS web GUI try auto-importing the pool

I know this process will probably take a good few hours, however, as far as I can see, (and from my limited knowledge of your config) you might be in luck and get access to your UFS pool.

 

[Panagiotis]

Thanx, i was planning on installing a windows os on a seperate disk and see if i can recover the files, this is something similar. I will do that and get back to you with news. thanx

 

[leenux_tux]

I would recommend using FreeNAS as it understands UFS, I don't think Windows will have any idea what to do with it and will almost definitely try to format the drives for you

Remember, install freenas to a USB. Don't try to install freenas to the drives you have a filesystem on already.

 

[Panagiotis]

Of course the new freenas will be on a new disk, i will not touch the 2 data disks. windows have 3rd party tools that can read/recover ufs ext3 partitions that;s why i mentioned it but i will give a clean freenas installation a try

 

[jgreco]

Sounds like it lost the RDM mappings. Fix them, back up all your data, and start over NOT using RDM as advised by some random website.

There are a bunch of reasons we instruct people not to do this. All of them exclaim with excitement how well it works, and some have been so rude as to state we're idiots or don't know what we're talking about. And yes RDM works, right until something fouls up and it takes your data with it.

And we don't really know exactly what happens. But we do know it is bad and hard for users to recover from.

 

[Panagiotis]

Believe me, i have read the discussions you are referencing to. I would not have used this in a business environment. Thing is, i am convinced that it is something trivial but i just don't enough to go on. How do you propose i "fix" the rdm? I tried recreating them but same result. How do you propose i start over NOT using RDM? you mean a dedicated machine? I cannot have another pc running 24/7 in my house.

 

[jgreco]

I would spend some time with a FreeBSD live CD looking at the disklabels to see if I could cipher out what had blown up. Since I haven't actually used RDM and blown up RDM and done that analysis, I have no clue what you'll find. I believe RDM is supposed to be able to map an entire DAS device, which implies the labels would be fine and usable, but there have been so many tears over the years, and I don't actually know what you did, all I can really guess is that your disklabels (the holy grail of recoverability) are floating around on your storage subsystem somewhere.

As for the future, the recommended solution is PCI-Passthru and the writeup I did on a specific strategy to maintain compatibility between a VM and a physical machine. This won't work with random hardware. But it works. I have a nice 30TB (12 x 4TB highly redundant) filer with 4 cores and 32GB of a large (E5-2697, 128GB) ESXi host that idles under 200 watts. If something goes wrong with ESXi, I can stick a USB key of FreeNAS in, boot, restore config, and be up and running in minutes.

 

[Flame Skywiper]

@jgreco, can i have a link on your write up about the PCI-Passthru?

thanks.

 

[cyberjock]

http://forums.freenas.org/threads/p...duction-as-a-virtual-machine.12484/#post58364

http://forums.freenas.org/threads/a...ide-to-not-completely-losing-your-data.12714/