Replacing a pair of failed drives and now USB Boot failure.

[dasMetzger]

Is this associated with trying to replace the failed drives? It is trying to boot from the new Toshiba 4GB drives i am attempting to replace. I went into BIOS boot settings and disabled the Toshiba drives and pointed to just the Sandisk USB drive that runs the FREENAS. but i get the 'Reboot and Select proper Boot device or Insert Boot Media in selected Boot device and press a key' message.

 

[dasMetzger]

i've had this 'Select proper Boot device' issue before, and i pegged it to a failed USB stick well after FreeNAS install and configuration.

should there be a 'bootable' device after the FreeNAS install?

 

[joeschmuck]

If you are using a USB Flash drive to bootstrap FreeNAS then that will be your bootable device, and yes, you must have some sort of bootable device. What you are describing is common and the only fix is to enter the BIOS setup and select the USB device as the first boot device.

 

[dasMetzger]

thanks for the reply. i have just tried restarting the NAS with the original hardware configuration (that is, with the two drives that were listed 'UNAVAIL' when i did a zpool status command, and resulted in my attempts to change out a failed drive)... and it still wont boot.

is it common for the flash drive to fail this often? this is my third one. and i felt it odd that it'd fail the moment i tried swapping out a drive.

also, reading in documentation, i needed to put my drives 'offline' before attempting a change? i could not put either of the two drives 'offline'. they just said 'unavail' when i did a status report. and they didn't even show in the disk manager gui.

last question:
if my flash drive is bad, and i need to a new install and restore my config... i probably have to do all this before i attempt to replace the failed drives. correct? so leave the old drives in place?

 

[joeschmuck]

USB Flash drives do fail, some of them more than others due to poor quality or not being able to handle the duty cycle they are put under, this was very true for earlier versions of FreeNASS. For this reason you will find that many people such as myself will recommend you use a small SSD as the boot device and eliminate future problems. I have not to date heard of any SSD failures with respect to FreeNAS boot devices.

If you have to rebuild your FreeNAS boot drive(s) then you can leave the drives connected. Are you running a RAIDZ2? If yes and these two drives are from that pool, and you desire to backup the data on this pool or some files, and you hve the room to do it, you could just install a minimally configured FreeNAS and copy your data off. There are a few ways you could do this but keep it simple. Once you have your files off then replace the hard drives one at a time until each has resilvered. You do not have to offline drive if it's unavailable. It happens.

 

[dasMetzger]

bumping this thread as i had some time to work on this. My problem above with the no boot has been fixed, i just re-installed a fresh copy of freenas on a usb stick and away we go. on to replacing the failed drives.

so yes, my raid is Z2 and two of the four (2 of 4) drives have failed. so i'm running critical right now with the same degraded message: The volume volume1 state is DEGRADED: One or more devices could not be opened. Sufficient replicas exist for the pool to continue functioning in a degraded state.

So to start replacing drives, what is my next step? Just turn the system off, replace one drive at a time and restart? or can i replace both simultaneously? like i said before, there wasn't an option to select the failed drives and turn them offline. am i going to have swap issues without doing this? or just start replacing stuff, restart, go to the gui and follow the documentation?

 

[dasMetzger]

for closure:
so i resilvered, everything is green and going well. i replaced both drives physically at the same time, but only resilvered one at a time. it took a total of about 20 hrs for both replacements to resilver.

i still never found a good answer for resilvering two drives simultaneously. and i guess it was just a coincidence that my usb drive failed at the same time i tried replacing HDD's in the raid.

 

[joeschmuck]

i still never found a good answer for resilvering two drives simultaneously.

Sorry I didn't see that you had an earlier question. The answer is to resilver a single drive at a time, especially in your situation. This is due to the time it takes to resilver. You want to resilver a new drive as fast as possible and if you are spreading that task over two drives (double the time) and you have yet another drive failure, then you have total data loss. So one drive at a time is preferred. You did it correctly.