Retrieve data from crashed system

[slant53]

I've been running FreeNAS on old hardware that finally died. I had two 1TB physical disks that I was using as separate drives (one was partitioned for the OS). The data drives had the ZFS on them.

First question is: if I am able to find a new box to rebuild with FreeNAS, would I be able to reuse these disks without losing data? If so what do I need to do?

Second question: can I get the data off these drives without FreeNAS? I have access to Win7, Ubuntu and MAC OS X machines but I can only connect to them with a USB enclosure

 

[Durkatlon]

You should be able to hang the disks off of a new FreeNAS system and do an auto-import from the GUI. If you want to retrieve the data using non-FreeNAS, I would recommend using a minimal FreeBSD install. If you don't have a FreeBSD system available, just build a temporary one by hooking up a small drive to an existing system.

I have experimented with the FreeBSD method of ZFS data recovery a little bit and posted about it here.

 

[dziring]

Are there freebsd live CDs available?

 

[Durkatlon]

I haven't found one for 8.2 which is the version you would want so you can get ZFS pool version 15. Admittedly I didn't look very hard.

You can boot into "Fixit" mode from the regular installation DVD, but that gets you a very bare bones boot with no network, no kernel modules, no nothing. You have to pretty much be a FreeBSD expert to get from that state to a fully functioning shell. That said, if you just want to back up the ZFS volume from the other machine to a disk which is already hooked up to the donor system, it's not big deal. You can load the kernel modules required. I already showed which modules to load to get ZFS working in the linked post, and there's also one for NTFS and other file systems already present on the distribution media.

 

[slant53]

You should be able to hang the disks off of a new FreeNAS system and do an auto-import from the GUI. If you want to retrieve the data using non-FreeNAS, I would recommend using a minimal FreeBSD install. If you don't have a FreeBSD system available, just build a temporary one by hooking up a small drive to an existing system.

I have experimented with the FreeBSD method of ZFS data recovery a little bit and posted about it here.

I was able to find another system and installed FreeNAS 8 on a separate drive (besides my two from my old system). However when I try to Auto Import the 'Disk' drop down menu on the Auto Import is empty and I can't do anything without making a selection. When I try to do a manual Import, a message pops up that says "Sorry, an error occurred". I found a similar problem in http://support.freenas.org/ticket/192 but I already had the same diskinfo as the solution suggested.

If I get on the system with SSH I can see the drives. I can mount them manually and the data looks OK.

Not sure what I should do next.

 

[wingnut44718]

Unable to see Hard Drives after New Install of 8.0.1

I had a pc setup as a FreeNAS server for my music and pictures, 2-40gig HDD, this has run for about 3 years solid. The other day the OS HDD crashed, so I installed a 20GB HDD just for the OS, installed 8.0.1. Now i cannot find the info on these drives, i have to remount them. I was wondering if i can recover the info on these drives from the older version, or will i loose everything to get these to mount to new version?

Sorry to continue on same thread, but this closest to my problem...