Failed hard drive replacement on FreeNAS 8.2

[chicocanada]

Hello all, I am running FreeNAS v8.2 on a Dell server. I have 4 HDs in RAID5. I had one HD fail and before I could replace it, a second drive went offline and I saw the PERC listed it as "foreign". I cleared the "foreign" and created a new virtual disk adding that formerly "foreign" listed disk to it. I replaced the failed drive with a new drive and created a virtual disk for that one as well. Dell PERC5 requires you create "virtual disks" for all drives.

Now I log into my GUI and I don't know what to do to bring back my volume online and get the new drive to resilver.

Please help?

 

[HoneyBadger]

The Disclaimer
Regardless of anything else that happened here; you're running a very old version of FreeNAS, you're using a RAID card, and you've lost two drives in a system that at some level was only set up to tolerate a single drive failure. Odds are very good your pool is damaged.

Longer version; you've introduced a layer of abstraction (hardware RAID) into the system, which means that unknown factors are impacting ZFS's ability to read your disk labels. Clearing/recreating the virtual disk may well have changed the label making it unreadable.

Given that you created a single vDisk for each device, it seems likely that you've used RAIDZ1 here rather than RAID5 on the PERC. Please confirm.

Open a shell prompt on your FreeNAS machine and type zpool status MyNAS and see if it recognizes the pool as mounted at all. It seems to be there.

 

[chicocanada]

Thank you for your reply! I am a rookie, just a heads up.

The PERC has each drive in separate virtual disk. AFAIK, the only way to bring a drive online server side is creating a virtual disk. The RAID5 is created by FreeNAS, not the PERC, otherwise FreeNAS would only see one drive, not four.

I get "no such pool" in shell.

I there a way to repair the volume and salvage some data if not all?

 

[chicocanada]

Anyone?

 

[Dan Tudora]

Anyone?

ya
me
do not mix PERC/hardware RAID/othter things with ZFS
put a decent HBA on server
do a decent read of documentantion of FN/TN
make a pool
destroy
make another try
destroy
make burnin Hdd like read in resources
wait
make another try
do something destructive (pull a hdd from system whnen is running)
working ??
if working ask "WHY"
put again hdd on system
resilver
check IF your dataset/file is there
is accesible
wait
sleep
think
next morning check again
success

 

[Jailer]

You forgot one thing. Do a backup and test restoring it.

 

[chicocanada]

Thank you both. The only way to bring drives online server side is to create virtual disks, standalone in my case. I don't understand how this will allow me to repair my volume so I can extract files.

 

[Jailer]

I don't understand how this will allow me to repair my volume so I can extract files.

It doesn't. You lost 2 drives in a pool with only 1 drive redundancy. Your data is gone.

 

[chicocanada]

It doesn't. You lost 2 drives in a pool with only 1 drive redundancy. Your data is gone.

I'm not sure the 3rd has failed.

 

[Jailer]

You don't need a third to fail. You lost one and then a second before the first was done re silvering. Your pool is gone.

Some of the other posters are trying to be kind and break it to you easily. The fact is you did some of things wrong when setting up your pool and you've lost data as a result. It sucks but that's the reality of it.

 

[chicocanada]

There wasn't any resilvering taking place. One failed or had errors, not sure. The other drive got listed as "foreign" by the server, not sure why either but seems like it might be ok.

 

[joeschmuck]

I don't want to sound like a pecker but everyone has told you that your data is gone because the manner in which you built your system provided you a fault tolerance of 1 drive failure. When you lose 2 or more drives then all data is gone.

With that said you do not sound like someone who would be able to attempt a manual data recover operation, heck, I wouldn't attempt it as it could be very time consuming and a real pain. If the data you lost is very important to you, you could hire a data recovery service, they charge a lot of money and will not guarantee data recovery but they are the best chance you have.

Also, do not use RAID cards for FreeNAS/TrueNAS as a RAID card but use it as an IT pass-thru HBA card. I myself am not worried about the old FreeNAS version you are running. For me it matters if it just works then all is good. If you continue with FreeNAS, you might want to ensure you properly and fully setup your system so you are testing your drives regularly and you receive email notifications so you can repalce a failing hard drive when it happens and not wait for all the drives to start failing.

I really hope the data on your system was not critical for you.

 

[Scharbag]

As others have said, your data is gone.

FreeNAS uses ZFS which is a software raid system. The Dell PERC is a hardware RAID card. Mixing the 2 is basically a recipe for disaster and unfortunately you are finding that out the hard way.

One question that I have: how long have you been running this system? FreeNAS 8.2 takes me back half a decade or so...

If you choose to use FreeNAS again, make sure you read the manual and the many help guide published on this site. ZFS is very flexible. ZFS is sometimes too flexible and allows some really bad choices to work - for a while.

Good luck!