Freenas won't boot after resilvering usb boot drive.

[Itsmittyhere]

I have two usb's mirrored for my boot drive. I kept getting a warning that one of the usb was degraded. I shut down Freenas and took it out and replaced it, then went into freenas and replaced it under the boot environment menu. After it resilvered I rebooted the Freenas to make sure it worked, and Freenas never loaded. Every time I reboot it freezes in random places while booting. I then took the degraded usb and booted from it and saved the config file to my pc.
So my question is, if I reinstall freenas onto the good usb drives and upload the config file, will everything work as far as my raid setup and my files will stay intact?
I'm still learning Freenas and right now I'm unsure how the config file works as far as restoring the settings. I have tens of thousands of photos I'm worried I'm going to screw it up worse and lose them.
Thanks.

 

[Chris Moore]

So my question is, if I reinstall freenas onto the good usb drives and upload the config file, will everything work as far as my raid setup and my files will stay intact?

That is how it is supposed to work. USB (as you are currently experiencing) is a poor choice for boot media. They are extremely unreliable.

I'm still learning Freenas and right now I'm unsure how the config file works as far as restoring the settings.

The config DB is a database of all the settings you configure through the FreeNAS GUI. If you have configured it, that configuration is saved in the DB. It is a good idea to make a backup of the database every time you make a change. I run a script that makes a weekly backup for me automatically.
If your boot media is completely gone, you can start with a fresh boot device, install FreeNAS, upload the config DB, which will cause the system to reboot, and all your settings should be back the way they were. This does not store any setting that you made from the command line, only settings made from the GUI.

 

[Chris Moore]

I have tens of thousands of photos I'm worried I'm going to screw it up worse and lose them.

Your data is stored in the pool, not on the boot media. It should be totally fine.

 

[Itsmittyhere]

Thanks, I understand they are in a pool, I just wasn't sure if I would have to redo the pool once I reinstall Freenas or if the config file would keep the pool as it was originally.
I guess I don't have much of a choice other than using the one degraded drive..

 

[Chris Moore]

Thanks, I understand they are in a pool, I just wasn't sure if I would have to redo the pool once I reinstall Freenas or if the config file would keep the pool as it was originally.

Don't do anything with the pool. If you import your existing config DB, it will know that the pool is out there and attempt to import the pool for you automatically, during that reboot I mentioned.
Even if you can't recover your old config DB, the pool is still there, with your data in it, and you can manually import that into a completely new installation of FreeNAS and all your data will still be there.
Just don't do anything to the pool disks and your data should be fine. You can even disconnect them, as a precaution, while you are working to fix the boot media problem.
Some computers have a hard time switching from one USB boot device to another. It can be even more of a problem with the new UEFI system firmware. I would suggest that you check the BIOS / UEFI configuration to ensure that the new USB device is properly selected as a boot device.
This type of problem usually is down to the system board having a problem with the USB device. It is one of the reasons we stopped suggesting the use of USB as a boot option. Reliability being the other key factor. I use a mirrored pair of 2.5" SATA hard drives (mechanical laptop drives) for my boot pool. They have been working fine for me in both of my home NAS systems for almost three years now.

 

[Itsmittyhere]

Ok, Thanks for the advice. I may have to switch to regular hard drives. Unfortunately my old dell T5400 case isn't the best, there are only 4 bays for drives. Does the config file save Plex server setting too?

 

[Chris Moore]

Does the config file save Plex server setting too?

Unfortunately, no. The times that I had to recover from a boot drive failure, long ago, I had to rebuild my Plex but that was under the older "warden" jails system. It is possible that it might be better now that we are using iocage for jails. All the Plex configuration should be stored inside the dataset that you are using for the jails, but reconnecting the jail was the difficulty under the old system. I have not worked with the new iocage configuration enough, @danb35 or @Jailer will likely have some insight on this. Hopefully they (or someone) will contribute here.

 

[Itsmittyhere]

Thats a bummer.. I disconnected the hard drives and reinstalling FreeNas as we speak..
Thanks again for your help!

 

[Itsmittyhere]

Well I'm back up and running and Plex is working without doing anything..
Shew, dodged a bullet there.
thanks!