Failed FreeNAS Mirrored Boot Drive Question

[pwnerman]

Hello,

The day has finally come where one of my boot flash drives failed. It was very sudden and I was at work when I got the email that the drive had been faulted because of "persistent errors."

Now I have it mirrored so it really didn't do anything to me then but I made the mistake at home to shut the server down and check the drive out. Well when I went to boot again it wouldn't go past the word GRUB in the bios. So what I did was I shut down the server again, removed that drive and transferred the larger (because I bought a second 32gb flash drive at a later date and FreeNAS wouldn't accept it because SanDisk must have changed something so I got a 64gb model.) redundant flash drive over to the USB port where the primary used to be. It booted and is working fine right now (abet in a degraded state for the boot drive) so that worked.

Few questions.

In the boot menu it still shows the drive being 32gb even though the one installed there is now 64gb. The missing drive is still there as well but showing as unaval because it's not installed anymore. I wasn't able to properly detach it.

Am I going to run into any issues here or can I just get another 64gb flash drive and click replace for the one that is currently unavailable or am I going to have to force detach the missing one first?

I know I should have just left it alone until I got the new one.

 

[Chris Moore]

I know I should have just left it alone until I got the new one.

No, you didn't do anything wrong.

Am I going to run into any issues here or can I just get another 64gb flash drive and click replace for the one that is currently unavailable or am I going to have to force detach the missing one first?

Just get another drive, plug it in and do the replace against the one that is not available. It isn't meant to be difficult.

 

[pwnerman]

No, you didn't do anything wrong.

Just get another drive, plug it in and do the replace against the one that is not available. It isn't meant to be difficult.

alright thank you. hopefully I don't run into the same issue I did before with SanDisk where they changed the sectors or something in the flash drive to the point where FreeNAS wouldn't accept it as a mirror drive

 

[Ericloewe]

all right thank you. hopefully I don't run into the same issue I did before with SanDisk where they changed the sectors or something in the flash drive to the point where FreeNAS wouldn't accept it as a mirror drive

Actually, it's mostly a FreeNAS problem. The size of the boot partition was increased recently, so trying to replace a drive with one of the same size will fail because the space available for the ZFS partition isn't enough.