Recoverable?

[PrinterElf]

Have a 4y/o Z1 setup running, and one of the HDDs died.
Not a problem, I thought, I've done this before - note down the S/N of the HDD from the WebGUI, offline the disk, shutdown the machine, swap disk, power on...
Power on.
Power. On.

Or not.

Having finally sourced a replacement PSU, I've booted the box.

Booting with the replacement HDD errors somewhere during the boot and throws me out to a command prompt, booting with the original just loops unable to read the HDD (well it was doing when I came up to bed, hoping it might resolve itself by the morning and at least start the services).

On the basis I can't remember the last time/where I backed up my config, how recoverable might this be?

Am I looking at a reinstall and recreate the config from scratch, or is it a lost cause.

 

[dlavigne]

I'd start with a reinstall on a fresh boot media to see if that resolves the boot issue. If it does and you can't locate a config, worse that will happen is you'll have to recreate the config. Note that if the Z1 comes back up you may have a copy of the config on the system dataset if it's not on the old boot device (see the Save Config section of http://doc.freenas.org/11/system.html#general).