Freenas Stuck starting up at "Beginning ZFS Volume Imports"

[Ash Swainson]

Hi guys,

looking for some advice, my system is stuck booting up at "beginning ZFS Volume Imports" looks like i might have made a muck up based on some similar threads i found on the forums, see here;

https://forums.freenas.org/index.php?threads/boot-up-stuck-at-importing-pool.35335/

https://forums.freenas.org/index.php?threads/mounting-local-file-system-hang.35339/

So the last thing i did was to delete a rather large (and still expanding) dataset that i had moved to a second pool as i was running out of space on the first dataset. approx 3TB of data was deleted, and if i understand right it seems that this is the reason for the system hanging.

i'm not quite clear on exactly what i should do now, from what i understand from the other posts it seems like it is possible to simply wait for the system to recover (possibly days to weeks :S) which is fine if that's the case. I wanted to make sure that this is the best action to take, i have backups of the data but would prefer not start over as i want to keep the other replaceable data as it was hard to collate.

The total volume was 12TB (3x6tb in raidZ2) if that is useful at all, from what i understand this is what determines the time to wait it out?

Also, if deleting the data is the cause of this problem, what is the "proper" way to delete data? surely there is a way to remove mass datasets without having to endure this process that i was too naive to look up before i did this?

Regards,

P.S.

system specs;
E3-1230v2
SuperMicro MBD-X9SCM-O M/B
Kingston valueRam 4x8GB ECC 1666mhz RAM
2 pools;
1 6x3 WD red RaidZ2
1 6x6 WD red PRO RaidZ2

Running 9.10.3 ( i think? the most current stable release)

TIA for any advice

 

[Ericloewe]

Also, if deleting the data is the cause of this problem, what is the "proper" way to delete data?

Don't reboot while stuff is being deleted. If you hadn't rebooted, it could've been done asynchronously, but the operation must be finished before the pool can be imported.

Sit back, have a coffee (or a hundred) and do something else.

 

[Ash Swainson]

hi,

i'm not entirely sure if i did reset while deleting, although i did do it an hour or so before. I assume i did basically the same things as those other threads as i had the same symptoms. I went into storage and deleted the dataset, all seemed to fine and went about doing some other stuff. i eventually tried resetting about an hour later as the space hadn't gone down (which i have learnt now is because of the snapshots) how long does it take to delete a dataset? being dumb i would have expected a warning?

no worries now though, i came down this morning and the system had recovered successfully, key now is understanding the process to avoid in the future :)