Bootup problems and RAID rebuild

[Diakonos1984]

A few years ago I built a simple home server with FreeNAS 8.2 and 3x1TB HDDs in a RAID5 configuration and one solo 200GB disk (All Seagate).
It has purred along nicely since then, and I have had to do no real maintenance to it. I was thrilled at how easy it was to get working and my FreeNAS education stopped right there (so please pardon my ignorance).

A short time back one of the drives in my RAID5 array died.

In my attempt to protect myself from data loss, I may have compounded my problems....
Let me tell you what I have done, and please let me know if I am headed in the right direction.

I bought a replacement drive for the RAID5 array, and went ahead and installed it in the machine. Since my data was still available (with only one disk failure) I thought I would to copy all the data off onto an external drive, just in case I messed something up in the process of rebuilding the array.
I followed the instructions here: https://forums.freenas.org/index.ph...l-drive-to-make-backup-of-data-on-server.9938
Through the shell in the web interface, I mounted the external drive, and ran and verified several copy procedures, then started a big one and went to bed.

When I got up the next morning, it appeared the copy procedure had finished, as I had a command line again in the shell interface. However, the shell was completely unresponsive. I couldn't type anything in.

I killed the power to the machine. I unplugged the external drive and checked it on my laptop.
All my files had successfully copied.

However, when I rebooted the FreeNAS machine I was greeted by

Code:

Mounting local file system:.
(ada3:ata0:0:0:0) lost device

It never moved past this point, and was never available over the network. I let it go all night to see if it would move on, but it did not.

I killed the power to it, and booted it back up in Single User Mode.

At the command line, I ran the lsdev command and got the following list:

Code:

disk0: BIOS Drive C:
  disk0s2: FFS bad disklabel
  disk0s3: FFS bad disklabel
  disk0s4: FFS bad disklabel
disk1: BIOS Drive D:
  disk1p1: FreeBSD swap
  disk1p2: FreeBSD ZFS
disk2: BIOS Drive E:
disk3: BIOS Drive F:
  disk3p1: FreeBSD swap
  disk3p2: FreeBSD ZFS
disk4: BIOS Drive G:
  disk4p1: FreeBSD swap
  disk4p2: FreeBSD ZFS

(I haven't been able to figure out which disk is 0,1,2,3,4 or C,D,E,F,G....)

I'm thinking the problem is that I never got to unmount my external drive before removing it (since I had to hard reboot).
But I haven't figured out how to get to a command line where I can unmount it.

I've also seen some indication in searching forums that my FreeNAS install on the flashdrive may be corrupted.
I've got a new flash drive on hand (I was going to upgrade to the most current version of FreeNAS while I was messing with the box anyway).

What do you think? Are my disk errors from the improperly removed external drive or from the bad member of the RAID5 array?

Is there a command line I'm missing where I could unmount the external drive?
Is it possible to go ahead and rebuild my array at this point?

Or should I install the latest version of FreeNAS on my new flash drive and get booted successfully BEFORE I try to rebuild the array?

Specs:

1GB Ram
Motherboard: MSI RS482M-IL (MS-7145 V2.1)
CPU: Older AMD Athlon... I don't know I built this like 5 years ago with a retired computer!

 

[dlavigne]

Well, with 1 GB RAM and UFS, you don't want the latest version as those are both unsupported. Unmount won't be the issue as a reboot would fix that. You'll have to figure out which disk is bad and see if the hardware RAID is fixable using the tools that came with the hardware.

 

[Diakonos1984]

Thanks dlavigne.

I was pretty embarrassed after posting this to realize that the 8GB recommendation didn't just apply to newer versions of FreeNAS but applied when I built this system years ago! Of course I used an old desktop box that was outdated at the time, and it won't take 8GB of RAM so, I am kind of up a creek there. Apparently I didn't read the documentation very closely back then...

I was able to figure out finally that it was the solo drive that was locking me up (which is strange, since it had had no indication of problems). I disconnected it, and was able to boot and rebuild my RAID array.

So it's mostly all working again, but I won't be attempting to upgrade FreeNAS or anything, since I have no plans on upgrading my motherboard and CPU.

 

[cyberjock]

As much as you might want to blame yourself, the project that had the name "FreeNAS" was a totally different beast 5 years ago. I can't even tell you what the requirements were for it because that code was later renamed to NAS4Free.

As for our documentation, as far as I know, 8.x recommended 2GB of RAM for UFS, and 9.x was 3GB of RAM for UFS.

So yeah, you may or may not have made some mistakes back then, but its never too late to get up on the current stuff. Just keep in mind that UFS isn't supported at all on 9.3, so the last version you'd be able to use is 9.2.1.9 (which recommends 3GB minimum).