Hello All,
Hopefully someone can provide a little assistance with my dilemma. (I hope this is the right place to post as well)
A year or two ago I setup a Freenas server for media sharing. Re-using some old spare kit, configured with 2Gb RAM and one 3TB drive. Once setup, I took the drive out and stuck in the drawer. I then put a new 3Tb drive in and created another volume, copied media to drive and been using happily ever since distributing media to my tv. A few months back the motherboard died. I just transferred the USB drive with the Freenas installation, along with the 3Tb drive to another spare box I had (2Gb RAM as well). Then powered up, autoimport, and I was off and away again.
This brings me to now...
Motherboard died again. Thought I would follow the same procedure. Transferred USB and 3Tb drive to a spare box (same RAM) and roughly same age and powered up. Freenas came up and I logged into the WebGUI. Message about unable to obtain size. Went to autoimport zfs volume and nothing there. Realised it was showing as a 2Tb drive. Powered down, BIOS update, power back on. See’s as a 3Tb now. Auto import – nothing there. Repeat process on two other spare PC’s (I have a lot of spare PC’s), one of them with only 1Gb RAM. Same issue. Detach the old volume (did not delete shares), retried to auto import – nothing there. Did some googling and ran a few tests. Eg gpart show, zpool status – nothing there regarding the 3Tb drive. I’ll attach screen shots if required. I noticed during bootup errors about GPT corrupt or invalid. Installed latest 9.2 Freenas release and tried import on there – same, nothing shows up, but 3Tb drive seen by freenas. I now pull the old 3Tb drive from the drawer which hasn’t been touched, plug in and have all the same results as per with the other drive. Just to make sure I hadn’t wiped the old drive and forgotten, I power up with this drive as the boot drive and got a message about being a freenas data drive – confirming to me that it is not blank. I grab a spare blank 500Gb drive and plug in, power up, create volume, detach volume, autoimport volume – all with no issues?!
At this point I am a little lost with where to go. I don't believe I have done anything that could have wiped the data, but same result on 3 PC’s and with 2 different 3Tb drives. As I had to BIOS update all 3 machines to allow 3Tb drive recognition (and the same result on 2 different drives) i do suspect that the issue is hardware related though.... please help!
Hopefully someone can provide a little assistance with my dilemma. (I hope this is the right place to post as well)
A year or two ago I setup a Freenas server for media sharing. Re-using some old spare kit, configured with 2Gb RAM and one 3TB drive. Once setup, I took the drive out and stuck in the drawer. I then put a new 3Tb drive in and created another volume, copied media to drive and been using happily ever since distributing media to my tv. A few months back the motherboard died. I just transferred the USB drive with the Freenas installation, along with the 3Tb drive to another spare box I had (2Gb RAM as well). Then powered up, autoimport, and I was off and away again.
This brings me to now...
Motherboard died again. Thought I would follow the same procedure. Transferred USB and 3Tb drive to a spare box (same RAM) and roughly same age and powered up. Freenas came up and I logged into the WebGUI. Message about unable to obtain size. Went to autoimport zfs volume and nothing there. Realised it was showing as a 2Tb drive. Powered down, BIOS update, power back on. See’s as a 3Tb now. Auto import – nothing there. Repeat process on two other spare PC’s (I have a lot of spare PC’s), one of them with only 1Gb RAM. Same issue. Detach the old volume (did not delete shares), retried to auto import – nothing there. Did some googling and ran a few tests. Eg gpart show, zpool status – nothing there regarding the 3Tb drive. I’ll attach screen shots if required. I noticed during bootup errors about GPT corrupt or invalid. Installed latest 9.2 Freenas release and tried import on there – same, nothing shows up, but 3Tb drive seen by freenas. I now pull the old 3Tb drive from the drawer which hasn’t been touched, plug in and have all the same results as per with the other drive. Just to make sure I hadn’t wiped the old drive and forgotten, I power up with this drive as the boot drive and got a message about being a freenas data drive – confirming to me that it is not blank. I grab a spare blank 500Gb drive and plug in, power up, create volume, detach volume, autoimport volume – all with no issues?!
At this point I am a little lost with where to go. I don't believe I have done anything that could have wiped the data, but same result on 3 PC’s and with 2 different 3Tb drives. As I had to BIOS update all 3 machines to allow 3Tb drive recognition (and the same result on 2 different drives) i do suspect that the issue is hardware related though.... please help!