Need help drive importing

[tbradley]

Hello

Got an ugly situation...

I have 2 identical FreeNAS servers, both same hardware specs down the brand of servers. same raid cards as well.

A few months ago one of the FreeNAS servers raid cards died.

I need that data from the broken raid server.

The question is can I remove the raid drives from the good server and install the raid drives from the broken server place them in the new server and import that data into freeNas for data retrieval?


FYI these drives were not formatted via hardware raid they were done software with freenas zfs raid.


Thank you, in advance for any help or responses.

Tim

 

[Redcoat]

Yes, you can do so - move the drives over and, if the pool is good, it will import and be readable.

 

[Chris Moore]

same raid cards as well.

I would sure like to know more about exactly what hardware you have before I make any definitive statements about what it will or won't do.
Can you give us a rundown on what it is you are working with because you can use so many different kinds of hardware with FreeNAS. You can even make things work that might not normally work together and we don't have any way of knowing what you have..

 

[Chris Moore]

Thank you, in advance for any help or responses.

If there isn't anything wrong with the boot drive, you could move that over also and if everything works the way it should, it will pickup all the previous system configurations as well as automatically importing the pool.

 

[tbradley]

I would sure like to know more about exactly what hardware you have before I make any definitive statements about what it will or won't do.
Can you give us a rundown on what it is you are working with because you can use so many different kinds of hardware with FreeNAS. You can even make things work that might not normally work together and we don't have any way of knowing what you have..

The server is an IBM server with Intel raid cards

I don't have the specs at hand right now due to being snowed in.

But the servers are identical and the boot drives are flash drives.
all SATA 12 drives were used for the software raid for the FN server.

I am just not sure if I can just take the broken servers raid drives and swap them to the working server to retrieve that data.

 

[tbradley]

If there isn't anything wrong with the boot drive, you could move that over also and if everything works the way it should, it will pick up all the previous system configurations as well as automatically importing the pool.

The broken server boot drive was tampered with trying to troubleshoot what was going on. But the 12 SATA raid drives are still in place. Just trying to find out if anyone has been in this situation. Lucky for me I had another working identical server. Thinking I can swap the drives seems like an ideal solution just don't want to wipe anything.

 

[danb35]

I am just not sure if I can just take the broken servers raid drives and swap them to the working server to retrieve that data.

If the "raid cards" were simply being used as HBAs, and were presenting the bare disks to the OS, then you should be able to do exactly this.

 

[tbradley]

If the "raid cards" were simply being used as HBAs, and were presenting the bare disks to the OS, then you should be able to do exactly this.

Well, i will be attempting to perform this task tomorrow then.

Thank you!

 

[Chris Moore]

The question in my mind is if the firmware settings of the SAS controller are the same. If they are, you should be able to move the drives over, do a fresh install of FreeNAS, but don't go through the setup wizard. There is an option under the storage configuration for importing an existing pool. The data should all be intact, you will just have to reconfigure your sharing.

 

[tbradley]

The question in my mind is if the firmware settings of the SAS controller are the same. If they are, you should be able to move the drives over, do a fresh install of FreeNAS, but don't go through the setup wizard. There is an option under the storage configuration for importing an existing pool. The data should all be intact, you will just have to reconfigure your sharing.

I believe the firmware is the same. the school purchased these servers from FleeBay a few years back and no updates or tampering with the server had been done since the power outage and the lost of the raid card on the server in question. So my thinking is that I can just swap the drives and spare myself the heart attack of data loss.

T