Boot Drive Recovery & Unexpected Disks to available for importing

[Dan Lee]

Hello Folks,

Last weekend, my production Freenas 9.10 something or another lost its USB boot drive. I yoinked the system out of the DC and brought it back to my office; verified the USB device was toast. Decided to throw in an SSD for the boot drive and attempt a fresh install of the latest 11 version. Happily, version 11 seemed to install without any issues, I ran the initial wizard and didn't appear to have much issue. I have 16 4TB disks configured in 2 raidz2 groups in a single volume and several datasets that all appear to be intact. Very oddly however I went to initiate the wizard to setup my SMB shares and it won't let me skip the volume creation portion and notifies me that 4 of my disks are to be formatted. I could have sworn that I had already extended my volume using these 4 disks months ago and everything has been running fine since then. At the time, I was over the 80% usage and was being warned daily. After I had extended the volume, the warnings cleared and my status has been good.

When viewing my disks through the import disk wizard, I see that 4, 5 and 13 appear to not be partitioned and possibly blank? but da15 has 2 partitions that equal 150% of the disk capacity? I'm super hesitant to do anything with the disks until I fully understand why they aren't part of my volume as I expect them to be.

I've confirmed under volume status that the 4 disks aren't part of my either of my raidz2 groups. I have a few permissions issues I haven't worked out yet in regards to what should be a locked down SMB share and an NFS shared that is currently read only; but I don't think that has anything to do with these 4 disks. Any thoughts?

Dan

 

[danb35]

but da15 has 2 partitions that equal 150% of the disk capacity?

Check again--those partitions are 4 TB and 2 GB. I'd bet money that disk had been partitioned with FreeNAS before. And yes, you can (and should) exit the wizard--then go to Storage -> Import Volume (not import disk), which should import your pool.

 

[Evertb1]

I noticed that you never mentioned that you loaded your old configuration or that you tried to import your volume in the new configuration.

 

[Evertb1]

PS. Downloading your configuration to a save place on a regular basis is really a good idea. It makes reinstalling Freenas after a crash of your boot device very easy and quick.

 

[Dan Lee]

Check again--those partitions are 4 TB and 2 GB. I'd bet money that disk had been partitioned with FreeNAS before. And yes, you can (and should) exit the wizard--then go to Storage -> Import Volume (not import disk), which should import your pool.

Nothing to import:

Ya, you're right, GBs and TBs are 2 way different things and I hadn't noticed that.

 

[Dan Lee]

I noticed that you never mentioned that you loaded your old configuration or that you tried to import your volume in the new configuration.

I didn't load my old configuration as I didn't have one. =( In regards to my volume, the Initial Wizard seemed to import it without any issue or so I thought. I haven't run a Volume Import at all yet apart from trying the above suggestion from Danb35.

 

[Dan Lee]

PS. Downloading your configuration to a save place on a regular basis is really a good idea. It makes reinstalling Freenas after a crash of your boot device very easy and quick.

Yes sir! It seems so easy and so practical but sometimes, the most obvious things become the hardest lessons. I'll have my config saved frequently moving forward. =)

 

[Evertb1]

I didn't load my old configuration as I didn't have one. =( In regards to my volume, the Initial Wizard seemed to import it without any issue or so I thought. I haven't run a Volume Import at all yet apart from trying the above suggestion from Danb35.

The suggestion of Danb35 is actually the thing to do. In this case the wizard won't help you out. After a fresh install just stop the wizard when you enter the GUI for the first time. If you have a saved config: Upload it and you should be OK again. Your volume(s) wil be found and you old configuration restored. If you don't have a saved configuration just use the Import Volume wizard and start tweaking your Freenas to your satisfaction again.

 

[danb35]

In regards to my volume, the Initial Wizard seemed to import it without any issue or so I thought.

What does the main Storage screen look like?

 

[Dan Lee]

It looks normal. I got really brave (or incredibly stupid) and went ahead with expanding my current volume to the 4 available disks. I had double and triple checked all my file shares prior to the operation and the data all looks fine. I went through the volume manager and used the manual setup successfully extending my raidz2 volume with the additional 4 drives. Everything still appears to be happy. Lastly, I'm trying to figure out why VMWare can't write to the NFS share I've created. Snippet of Storage: