SOLVED Made system not bootable, need sanity check on process to fix.

Greg_E

Explorer
Joined
Jun 25, 2013
Messages
76
OK, he's what happened:

Running 11.1-u5 on some SuperMicro hardware (X11 board) and it was working mostly fine. FreeNAS was installed on two USB 3 drives as mirror, but one had failed. Disconnected the failed drive and mirrored to an internal SSD. Thought it was fine after a reboot, and decided to remove that USB (since it would likely fail in the near future, this is the third drive of this model to fail) and mirror boot to a second SSD. Status reported that everything was good with resilvering both SSD, so I tried a reboot...

Nothing, no bootable drives. Check in BIOS and make sure that these SSD are listed to be able to boot, and restart again. Still nothing. Put the USB drives back in and restart, still no bootable drives...

So now I'm left with choices, and asking what choices I may have.

#1 is there an easy fix to make the SSD's bootable?

#2 do I go back to the 11.1-u5 install disk and do a clean install, then restore the back up config?

#3 something else?

I do have a recent system back up file, but I've never had to recover a system from the file. Do I simply restore that file into the system after a clean install and everything is good. Or do I need to import the volumes first, then restore the backup file?

I do have a second FreeNAS 11.1-u5 up if I need to attach those SSD to it and run some commands from a FreeBSD terminal. Hoping for a simple way to copy some files to these SSD to make them bootable, but I'll do whatever is easiest. Need this up and running in the next few days, thankfully our students are on break this week so I have a little time to fix this.

And sorry for what is probably a very basic question, in panic I did a quick search but not very thorough so please forgive my haste in posting.

Greg
 

Chris Moore

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Joined
May 2, 2015
Messages
10,080
I do have a recent system back up file, but I've never had to recover a system from the file. Do I simply restore that file into the system after a clean install and everything is good. Or do I need to import the volumes first, then restore the backup file?
If you have not already moved to the next step here, you can do a clean install, and restore the backup of the configuration database. All your settings are in the configuration database as long as you made those settings in the GUI. When you restore the configuration, it will cause the system to reboot. When it does, it will come up with the settings from before, including importing the pool. You go from clean install to fully configured in one step. That is the beauty of FreeNAS.
 

Greg_E

Explorer
Joined
Jun 25, 2013
Messages
76
I did this on some fresh SSD's to make sure I didn't lose anything... It seems to have worked but I did get several errors that I need to find in the log so I can really read them.

The ones I remember the most were many GRUB errors about something missing. I'm going to assume that these came from the lack of boot environments on the new disk. This machine started as 11.0 > 11.1-u1 > 11.1-u2 > 11.1-u5 plus the first install. The new disk has only the first install which is 11.1-u5 and I think this is why GRUB threw a bunch of errors.

I'm going to look for the logs and dig them out, then disconnect one of the SSD's and reboot, then disconnect the other and reboot to make sure both disks will really boot. Should have done that when the first USB failed and I mirrored to an SSD.
 
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