SOLVED "This is a FreeNAS data disk and cannot boot system"

[Grinas]

hey,

Yesterday i added a drive and a new volume to my server and it booted up fine while i was working on it last night doing a configuration on an openvpn jail it rebooted for no reason instead of waiting for it to reboot I went to bed and woke up this morning to this message.

"This is a FreeNAS data disk and cannot boot system"

from reading other threads on the forum the possible cause is either boot order issue error or boot drive failure.

i had a check and confirmed the boot order is correct and that boot from USB is first and i even disabled most of the others but still get the error. there are no other usbs connected to the server.

I doubt it is the boot drives failing as i have 2 drives mirrored. Is it possible they both failed at the exact same time? they are less than a year old good quality Sandisk drives?

Is there any other possible causes for this issue?

running freenas 11 on a dell t20 server.

 

[looney]

As you said it does sound like its trying to boot of one of the pool drives.

To narrow things down, can you remove all other drive apart from the 2 USB's and see if it boots fine then?
If it does then you will have to look into the boot order once more after you have reconnected the pool drives.

If it does not boot without the drives then it indeed does look like a bad boot drive, you can try running a new install and see if the install recognizes the old boot drives.
In that case you can reinstall freenas while keeping the old configs in place. If the installer does not recognize the old boot mirror then I hope you have a config backup.

Keep in mind that regardless of what happens your pools should be absolutely fine regardless of having a new config or not on the OS.

 

[Grinas]

OMG i cant believe i missed it, my misses was after inserting another USB into the server and i never seen it cuz it so small and in the front.

she didn't realise that it was a different machine than the computer thats next to it.

At least it was a simple solution.:):);)