ZFS Drive no longer showing

[drinkingguinness]

So I tried to move my system from straight FreeNAS to FreeNAS on ESXi. I had two drives which one I was able to move over fine but the other (of course with all the important stuff on it, pictures, etc) is no longer being recognized by either ESXi or the old FreeNAS system it self. When I try to import the volume (on the old system) the drive does not appear. However, if I try to import Disk the drive appears fine but will not import, I'm assuming since it has a ZFS Pool on it.
When looking at Storage, Volumes, the drive shows but under the used column shows "0 (Error)" Available column shows "Error getting available space" and status "UNKNOWN"

Is there anything I can do or have I just lost a ton of data?

Thanks in advance!

 

[Robert Trevellyan]

You'll need to provide a lot more information for anyone to have a chance of helping you.

import Disk

That function is for importing foreign filesystems, e.g. NTFS (but it doesn't seem to work very well).

 

[joeschmuck]

Maybe you are drinking too much Guinness? :D Sorry, I was just agreeing with your user name.

But seriously, it doesn't sound like you know what you are doing and I'm not being condescending. While a person can move a pool from a bare metal FreeNAS system to an ESXi system, you have to know how to expose the drives to the VM in pass-through. Also if you are running single disk vdevs, that is not good either.

On your old system in the GUI go to Auto-Import and try to import your drives. If it works then count your blessings. Backup your data and read a lot more before moving forward. FreeNAS while it may look easy because the GUI is nicely designed, is not a beginners piece of software.

I hope you can get to your data and please post the required information to move further down this path.

 

[drinkingguinness]

OK I will try my best. I appreciate your responses.

DELL Vostro 200
motherboard make and model - Onboard DELL LGA775 SOcket 800MHz Intel G333 Express

• CPU make and model - Intel Pentium DualCore E2140

• RAM quantity - 2GB (two chips DDR2 SDRAM)

• hard drives - model numbers - WDC_WD15EADS2D00P8B0 (qty 2)

RAID configuration - RAID 1

• hard disk controllers - onboard DELL

• network cards - onboard DELL

BUILD NUMBER - FreeNAS-9.10.1-U2 (f045a8b)
2GB of RAM

When trying to import volume, the disk simply does not appear. no error message. is there anything I can run from the command line to see if my data is still available?

 

[Jailer]

Your hardware is woefully inadequate for FreeNAS. There is no way that what you are trying to do will end well.

 

[drinkingguinness]

I do have a DELL i7 Precision I could use. Do you think its possible to save the data using that machine instead?

 

[joeschmuck]

Minimum specs require 8GB RAM, and preferably ECC RAM.

 

[SweetAndLow]

OK I will try my best. I appreciate your responses.

DELL Vostro 200
motherboard make and model - Onboard DELL LGA775 SOcket 800MHz Intel G333 Express

• CPU make and model - Intel Pentium DualCore E2140

• RAM quantity - 2GB (two chips DDR2 SDRAM)

• hard drives - model numbers - WDC_WD15EADS2D00P8B0 (qty 2)

RAID configuration - RAID 1

• hard disk controllers - onboard DELL

• network cards - onboard DELL

BUILD NUMBER - FreeNAS-9.10.1-U2 (f045a8b)
2GB of RAM

When trying to import volume, the disk simply does not appear. no error message. is there anything I can run from the command line to see if my data is still available?

This setup will not work. Best to get hardware that meets the requirements of Freenas.

 

[drinkingguinness]

It ran fine on this workstation before. All I am trying to do is recover lost data and rebuild to the i7 machine.

 

[gpsguy]

Does your i7 have at least 8GB of RAM? If so, you could try using it.

There are no guarantees that it'll work. You may have irrecoverably damaged your pool by running it with insufficient RAM.

Note: i7's don't support ECC, so it's not recommended.

 

[joeschmuck]

If you have at least 4GB of RAM (8GB is the recommended minimum but 4GB will boot on most machines and do basic things) on your i7 machine, you may be able to recover your data but you also may experience system crashes. Have you read the user guide on how to import your pool? If not, this is where you need to start.

Once you are able to import your pool, I'd back up the data to some other media. If you were able to run on 2GB RAM before and never had a system crash, count yourself lucky. But then again, the issues you are having now could be the result of running such low RAM. It's not that FreeNAS can't run, it's more like ZFS hates to play and loves to crash.

I wish you the best of luck recovering your data.

 

[Robert Trevellyan]

is there anything I can run from the command line to see if my data is still available?

zpool import will tell you if the system can see the pool. Don't actually try to import it on an under-specced system.

 

[Stux]

A heinous problem is that as your pool gets bigger it can take more ram to maintain the tables referring to the pool.

2GB might be just peachy with an empty pool.

 

[drinkingguinness]

Thanks for the feedback guys. I tried the drive in the i7 system last night with the latest STABLE release of freenas built on a thumb stick. When trying to import the ZFS pool, via IMPORT VOLUME, the drive is not seen. However when looking at the volume manager the drive appears as if it is new. Am I screwed?

 

[joeschmuck]

Am I screwed?

Possibly, mainly because we don't know what you did to your system so you could have deleted the vdev.

Right now I am thinking that your Dell had a RAID card and you may have had the drives configured as a true RAID1. This would of course make your drives non-usable in any other computer. Of course maybe you were not using the RAID card, it's just speculation on my part but if you know for sure, then you have your answer.

One thing you can try is to see if there is any data structure on the hard drives, open a shell window and type "cd /dev/ada0" and then type "ls". Does something come up? If yes, what?

 

[SweetAndLow]

zpool import
gpart show
camcontrol devlist

What is the output of these 3 commands?

 

[drinkingguinness]

Thanks for sticking with me guys!

Here is the output.

Code:

[root@freenas] /dev# cd ada0
ada0: Not a directory.
[root@freenas] /dev# cd /
[root@freenas] /# zpool import
[root@freenas] /# gpart show
=>	  34  30660541  da0  GPT  (15G)
		34	  1024	1  bios-boot  (512K)
	  1058		 6	   - free -  (3.0K)
	  1064  30659504	2  freebsd-zfs  (15G)
  30660568		 7	   - free -  (3.5K)

[root@freenas] /# camcontrol devlist
<WDC WD15EADS-00P8B0 01.00A01>	 at scbus5 target 0 lun 0 (ada0,pass0)
<SanDisk Cruzer Glide 1.27>		at scbus9 target 0 lun 0 (pass1,da0)

 

[SweetAndLow]

You have no disks that are part of a pool. Only 1 disk attached. That 1 disk has no partitions.

 

[drinkingguinness]

I checked the BIOS before booting to FreeNAS and had to set the USB stick bootable. Both the stick and the WD Drive were present in the BIOS.