Drive Failure

[Frikkie274]

Hi.

I am running a FreeNAS home-built nas at home. It has an i5 3200 and 16gb of ram, with an intel desktop board. For storage, I have a single 2tb disk for my main storage and a few other disks for my VMS and so forth. I recently acquired another 2tb disk from a friend. I installed it into my system and added it to my main storage volume in a stripe config. All disks are NTFS format.

I started noticing the other day that this new drive is spitting out read errors and then i/o errors and as a result later on my FreeNAS server crashed. I pulled the suspect drive out and rebooted the nas. now my main storage pool is missing and now I tried to connect the drive to my pc. In diskpart I do see my drive being picked up but no way to assign a drive letter to it or send the data of the drive to what's left of my nas.

Any suggestions on how I should go about this? Or should I just accept that my data is all gone?

 

[JaimieV]

(First - you say "all drives are NTFS format", but what do you mean? You definitely can't mean that your old 2Tb and the new one are NTFS, as you wouldn't be able to make them into a ZFS pool if they were. They are reformatted to ZFS when this happens.

So, assuming you mean "you can see them from Windows" through the network share? That doesn't mean they're NTFS, the remote system can use any filesystem it likes.)

To continue, assuming that the pool is a perfectly normal ZFS implementation:

When you added the new drive to the main storage pool as stripe, you held a gun up to your head. The drive dying pulled the trigger.

Stripe is equivalent to "RAID0", where all your data is spread across two drives with no redundancy, no recovery. If one drive dies, you lose everything. There's no filewise recovery possible from one disk, as it is blocks that are spread across the disks in stripes, not files.

Unless you have a backup, or you can revive the drive, your data is gone.

Put the drive back into the FreeNAS machine, boot it up and see if it'll come back.

If not, you may *possibly* be able to recover a bunch of your files off the old 2Tb, using one of those recovery software tools that scan the whole surface of the disk looking for things that look like files and reconstructing them, because ZFS doesn't spread the old files over both disks, only newly-written/changed ones. I wouldn't hold too much hope though.