Drives not detected and pool status offline and unknown

[dresified]

I have 4 WD drives in an extended mirrored ZFS configuration no raid. USB boot drives are working fine.
I shut the server down to replace some old noisy fans and some cable management.
While the sata cables were all unplugged my son turned on the server. I let it boot all the way up and shut it back down.
Plugged everything back in correctly and booted up.
Now none of the drives in the pool are being recognized at all.
Status for the pool is offline and unknown.
The disk status just shows the boot drives plugged in.

I have checked the power supply and cables several times.
The server can see new drives that are plugged in.
I also took one of the drives to another server to see if it could see the drive and it could not.

How can I get freenas to see the drives again? When you boot up without your pool attached does freenas set the drives to offline?

 

[Gblake65]

I am having a similar Issue where 4 of my 6 show, my pool is Unknown. All the drives are discovered and visible in the BIOS.

 

[PhiloEpisteme]

Hi @dresified. What version of FreeNAS are you running? Have you checked to see whether the drives (not the pool) exist from the GUI or the CLI? What is the output of zpool import?

 

[dresified]

FreeNAS version is 11.2
Yeah the drives don't show up anywhere.
Seems like somehow all 4 drives are bricked.
They don't show up in bios. I tested other drives on the ports and tested the cables. So all the ports, cables and power are verified working. Even plugged the drives into another working computer and they don't show up on it either.

 

[roni]

Any advice to add if your drive(s) are showing up? I'd love to get the drive reconnected, I'm not sure how I lost it in the first place, there is the possibility of a child touching the cord. But what are the next steps to attempt to reconnect the pool without loosing the data?

 

[PhiloEpisteme]

Generally when you have a drive issue you want to use process of elimination. If opening the case and double-checking cables are secure or swapping out cables doesn't work the issue is likely the drives or the motherboard. If you can plug another drive into the same cable and port and it shows up that suggest the original drive was the issue; if not it suggests the board may have a problem. If you cannot get your drives recognized by another system you've almost certainly got a bad drive.

If the issue is your hard drive you'll need to replace it following the User Guide.

@dresified, my bet is your drives have gone bad. If this caused you to lose your pool you may need to recover from backup.