GRUB error: unknown filesystem

[ksp]

Hello!

3 weeks ago I had successfully upgraded from 9.2 to 9.3 FreeNAS, was running fine since then. But yesterday I was greeted with non-working server, SYMPTOMS:
- no ping,
- no FreeNAS console menu, although keyboard echo was there,
- secondary console (Alt+F2) displayed login prompt, but was not working,
- transmission was still sending some messages.

Had to reset the server, now it's displaying a GRUB error:

CONFIG:
- single USB stick as a boot drive (running FreeNAS for at least 4 years).
- Asrock rack E3C224D2I, 8GB RAM, Intel G3220, 4 HDD ZFS pool RAIDZ1 (ZFS version from 9.2), 1 HDD for backup.

QUESTION:
Is there anything I can do at this point to try to revive the boot-pool, or should I just start from scratch with a new USB stick (or two) and restore saved config from 9.2? I didn't save 9.3 config yet :(

 

[hugovsky]

Seems your usb stick is dying. Try to use a new one. You can try to get your config back if your system dataset is within your pool. There's info in the forum about that.

EDIT: check this thread. It may be others.

EDIT2: or maybe this.

 

[ksp]

hugovsky, thanks for the links, those could be useful. I'll try to see if I can mount the boot-pool in some way to salvage the latest config.

 

[ksp]

Booted up the install CD through IPMI, opened shell, and seems like USB drive is really corrupted, boot-pool shows up in zpool import, but trying to import it using the following command fails:
zpool import -f -F -R /mnt 74146517983444996 oldboot

Boot-pool now shows up as CORRUPTED, before the command it was ONLINE. Oh, well.. Seems that 9.3 is more demanding to USB drives, perhaps, more writes going on, and mirror is a must.

 

[hugovsky]

Oh, well.. Seems that 9.3 is more demanding to USB drives, perhaps, more writes going on, and mirror is a must

I think that before zfs, problems were not reported, so, silent corruption, which is worse.

Your settings are not in the USB drive. They're in the pool. You should install 9.3 in a new stick and then use auto-import in GUI. Then, check for the file. And then, restore config.

 

[ksp]

Oh, didn't realize that, I'll try to do it this evening.

 

[hugovsky]

These are, more or less, the steps needed:

1- install 9.3 on new stick;
2- boot new stick;
3- auto-import pool;
4- go to shell and check /var/db/system and look for something like: domain.name-YYYY-MM-DD.db. Check for the latest date;
5- restore config.

Hope this helps.

You can read this thread too.

 

[ksp]

Did like suggested above, but there were no .db files in /var/db/system, and no usable files in /data. Ended up uploading the old 9.2.1.5 config - after one more reboot to convert the settings everything was up and running. Tried to change the config a couple of times, but still there were no .db files in /var/db/system.

Thanks for suggestions! Now I have to shop for a couple of new USB sticks.

 

[hugovsky]

Nice to ear that you solved it.

 

[rogerh]

On possible reason for the being no config file in /var/db/system is that you might have chosen in the GUI (System/System Dataset) to put your system dataset on the boot pool rather than the data pool. You obviously can't tell now as the original boot device is not available and neither is the config file, but one reason for choosing the data pool is that the config file will then survive loss of the boot device. But it is even better to back up the config file on another computer, and this can easily be done in the GUI (System/General/Save Config).