External hard drive isn't working with Freenas build

[Chisomo Banzi]

Hi there. Recently, I reinstalled freenas onto a 2gb SD card and for the most part, the installation was very smooth. However, when it boots up, it tries to read from my external hard drive (2TB USB) and comes up with the error in the picture.

I really need to get it to work so that i can access the volume i made before and then i can take the files from the freenas internal hard drive. If i can't get the hard drive to work, ill be forced to format my internal hard drive and that isn't an option.

Thank you all very much. I'm still a noob at using freenas so i appreciate any help. Thanks

Here is a picture of the error message

 

[cyberjock]

I will say that SD cards are NOT recommended or supported on FreeNAS. So maybe you should try a real USB stick and see if the booting process will finish. ;)

I added the warning in the manual not to use converters. And I did that because they cause problems that aren't always directly attributable to the conditions.

 

[diedrichg]

You also may have difficulty having the BIOS determine which usb device to boot to. Most can do that with no problem but make sure you have that set correctly.

If you still have issues booting to FreeNAS on your _USB_ drive you may have a failed installation. Try the CD ISO installation. If that didn't work then use the IMG installation or vice versa.

Sent from my SGH-I337 using Tapatalk

 

[Chisomo Banzi]

Ill give booting from a USB a try.

But when I was before it was working fine for the most part. But it used to try to boot from the external hard drive everytime instead of the usb with freenas installed on it which would result in an error. In my bios settings, it only has a general USB hard drive option to boot from and not the specific devices and eventually i gave up and decided that a different boot device would fix it, so i tried an sd card. Is there anyway i can specify which USB device to boot from?

 

[cyberjock]

Specifying what device to boot from is motherboard specific. It may or may not support it.

 

[diedrichg]

You would need to be at the terminal during each reboot spamming F12 immediately after the POST to select the desired usb stick since your mobo does not have that option of choosing.

 

[Chisomo Banzi]

Fair enough. Im using my old Hp compaq as a home server. I'll give that a go but if it doesn't work i could live with it, or look on the hp website for more information. One last thing i was curious about, what would happen if you disconnected the USB from the freenas box while it's on, would it corrupt the usb or damage the files in storage? My freenas build is in a place where the USB with the operating system isn't always safe from being bumped and disconnected. Thos two reasons made me which to an SD card.

 

[diedrichg]

Why can't the disk live in the box? Is it a SATA>PATA issue? I'll have nightmares tonight about your zpool being on an external usb drive enclosure.

 

[Chisomo Banzi]

Do you mean the disk with the operating system or the external storage hard drive?

 

[diedrichg]

Unless it's absolutely necessary, your data drive should physically be inside your computer case - attached to a SATA or PATA cable.

 

[Chisomo Banzi]

My problem is that I created my build from my old laptop, probably not the smartest idea for adding extra storage but it has its advantages. I might just end up moving all my stuff to a desktop computer or even just buy the official freenas server. Thanks for all the help, ill keep notified if anything comes up.

 

[Chisomo Banzi]

Okay, I really need help. I tried booting off of a 2gb Usb, same error,

uhub_reattach_port : could not allocate new device

2gb sd, 2/4/8gb USB and all the same results. Its tough because i could live without it but i have important files on the internal hard drive. Freenas won't import the volume i had previously and im pretty sure its because i need my external hard drive. If i could somehow get the files from the internal hard drive and put them somewhere else then mission accomplished. But i can't because zfs is tricky with most operating systems. I can't format it, i would if i could, because these files (photos) are really important to us. Any help is highly appreciated, thanks.

 

[cyberjock]

I'd say go back to the version of FreeNAS you had. If you still have that problem maybe your laptop has a hardware failure that's causing you these problems.

I will say that laptops are about the worst possible choice for FreeNAS both in performance as well as reliability. Putting your important data on it was a terrible mistake. There's a chance you'll never get your data off that zpool because of your choice of hardware, but I think you've already figured out it was a terrible mistake.

Other than going back to an old version, pull the drive out and connect it to a desktop and boot up FreeNAS on the desktop.

 

[Chisomo Banzi]

Yeah i sure did learn my lesson. I'm giving your first suggestion a go and now the error doesn't appear but the external hard drive isn't recognised. I think that might be a step in the right direction, but i dont know. Is there a way i could take the hard drive and access it on another computer without Freenas and the external hard drive?

 

[cyberjock]

Yes.. do what I said in my last post.. take the drive and try it in a desktop with FreeNAS installed. ;)

 

[Chisomo Banzi]

Okay, so i did everything you told me to and while i was at it, i inserted the external hard drive into the computer's sata port and that made things a little better and reliable too. It booted up like a charm and both drives are recognised and the volume, Home, showed up in Auto Import... But when i tried to import it, it came up with an error. I checked my freenas box and it said...

freenas manage.py: [middleware.notifier:3206] Importing Home [34.591478831502588] failed with: cannot import 'Home': I/O error

Thanks for the help so far and would really appreciate it if you could help once more. thanks

 

[cyberjock]

That is the typical sign of a corrupt pool. Do you have backups?

 

[Chisomo Banzi]

No, well i diddn't intentionally back it up.

I entered this into the shell and it came up with this:
So i guess it is a corrupt pool, is there anything i can do?
[root@freenas ~]# zpool import pool: Home id: 3491591478831502588 state: FAULTED status: The pool metadata is corrupted. action: The pool cannot be imported due to damaged devices or data. The pool may be active on another system, but can be imported using the '-f' flag. see: http://illumos.org/msg/ZFS-8000-72 config: Home FAULTED corrupted data gptid/b002dde0-b342-11e3-b28d-001f299bbc64 ONLINE

 

[cyberjock]

I offer data recovery services. Got about a 85% success rate for problems similar to yours. If interested PM me and we can chat.

 

[diedrichg]

Could it be a conflict in FreeNAS versions/zfs version?

Should he just force the import with -f?