My ZFS volume will not import

[simstud]

We set up this machine a couple years ago, and it has been in the corner of the lab since working like a champ. Since it was working, we didn't touch it. On Monday she didn't work anymore. Nothing that I know of happened, no one was here to touch it, although we did get a lot of snow, the power may have flickered.

This is an old Dell tower (P4, 3GHz) with 1 GB Ram, and we installed 4 SATA drives (3 TB each) for the ZFS and 1 PATA drive for FreeNAS. It's running FreeNAS-8.2.0-RELEASE-p1-x86 (r11950).

The system boots and seems to work, but the folder with all our data in it (/mnt/Cornucopia) is not there. The webGUI has a flashing yellow light with the message "WARNING: The volume Cornucopia (ZFS) status is UNKNOWN".

All of the drives seem healthy. Running 'smartctl -H /dev/atax' returns "PASSED" on all drives, although one drive shows an overtemp warning.

Trying to manually import does not work either:

[root@freenas ~]# zpool import
pool: Cornucopia
id: 14126106999090383939
state: ONLINE
action: The pool can be imported using its name or numeric identifier.
config:

Cornucopia ONLINE
raidz1 ONLINE
gptid/18618201-053b-11d9-9746-0011114cd580 ONLINE
gptid/18e92f88-053b-11d9-9746-0011114cd580 ONLINE
gptid/19650778-053b-11d9-9746-0011114cd580 ONLINE
gptid/19e0ab19-053b-11d9-9746-0011114cd580 ONLINE

[root@freenas ~]# zpool import Cornucopia
cannot import 'Cornucopia': one or more devices is currently unavailable​

"zpool import -f -F Cornucopia" returns no errors but does not work either.

output of "dmesg -a"

Googling led me to others who have had this problem, but usually after migrating the pool from one computer to another. It seems everyone gave up and wiped and reinstalled. Any ideas?

 

[rs225]

The first easy thing to try is pulling one drive at a time, powering up, and seeing if the pool imports. Maybe you'll get lucky. If you do, then you can shutdown, replace the pulled drive, and it should resilver it on next boot.

Otherwise, I think you are going to need to use a newer system to attempt recovery(newer ZFS versions are a little more robust and have more debug options). And the problem there is that you really need to have a 64-bit CPU with more RAM. The official recommendation is 8GB.

 

[cyberjock]

I hate to break it to you, but importing a broken pool with 1GB if RAM borders on impossible. You're going to need a system with 8GB of RAM (and 64-bit) to even make attempts at recovery. I will warn that if you try without those two things you could make things worse as termination of threads and such because of RAM can yield a pool that is unrecoverably damaged.

 

[Ericloewe]

That hardware is a nightmare scenario for FreeNAS.

9.2.x wouldn't even boot with 1GB of RAM, according to those who tried.