Pool Offline TrueNAS

[Decess]

EDIT: Initial problem was solved. Very similar problem appeared. Then everything went bad. Check my 03/21/2023's reply please!

Hey there. I'll start by saying that I'm kind of new to all this and I'm somewhat computer savvy for the average day to day stuff, configuring home networks, formating and setting up computers, assembling hardware, etc. But I'm not very "tech" savvy in anything more specific than that.

I'm running

M5A78L-M Motherboard
AMD FX-8320E CPU
8GB of ram, not sure what model and specs
5x WD Red NAS 6TB WD60EFAX
1x SSD PNY cs900 120GB SSD7CS900-120-RB

SSD and HDDs are all "new" (bought last november).

My pool is configured to have one drive as a redundancy feature. I mean instead of roughly 5x6=~30gbs, I had 24gbs of storage, because one drive is supposed to be used for redundancy. I don't remember how this is called, I'm very sorry. As I am sorry for my general ignorance on the topic and if I failed to give you enough information about my problem.

I had a power outage and now my pool is now offline.

I'm attaching some images which might help you help me with my problem.

I thank you in advance.

Also zpool status -v tank gives me "no such pool"

 

[Decess]

Also I didn't actually tried doing anything to fix my problem since I'm afraid I'll do something to make things even worse.

 

[Arwen]

Your data pool is exported, (as if it is ready for moving to another computer). The zpool status command output is perfectly normal for when your data pool is exported.

Under the storage tab their should be an Import button. Use it, and you should be able to select your pool "tank" for import.

Do not use the Add, Create or other buttons.


One word of warning, those Western Digital hard drives are SMR, (Shingled Magnetic Recording), and not really suitable for use with ZFS. They have been known to cause problems for many other people. But, let us get access to your data before we get in depth with this problem.

 

[Decess]

Thank you for answering!

Under the storage tab their should be an Import button. Use it, and you should be able to select your pool "tank" for import.

Under the "Storage" tab I see "Pools", "Snapshots", "VMware-Snapshots", "Disks" and "Import Disk".

I suppose you're talking about "Import Disk".

When I click it, I get these options and I'm not sure where my "tank" pool is:

If I click the dropdown arrow to the right to select a Disk, I get all my disks (except my boot SSD) twice:

What exactly does this mean an how should I proceed?

Do not use the Add, Create or other buttons.

I won't. Thanks for letting me know.

One word of warning, those Western Digital hard drives are SMR, (Shingled Magnetic Recording), and not really suitable for use with ZFS. They have been known to cause problems for many other people. But, let us get access to your data before we get in depth with this problem.

Hmmm, I'm interested to know more about this. But I agree with the "let us get access to your data before we get in depth with this problem" ahhahaha

Thank you for your help.

 

[Redcoat]

Look under Storage>Pools>Add>Import an Existing Pool

 

[Decess]

Look under Storage>Pools>Add>Import an Existing Pool

Thank you for the answer!

Found it there.

When it prompts me about "decrypt pool", it prompts me with "Does the pool have GELI Encryption from FreeNAS/TrueNAS 11.3 or earlier?"

I have only used TrueNAS 13.0, therefore I shoul select "No, continue with import", right? May be a stupid question, but I want to be 100% sure that I'm not doing any mistakes.

 

[Decess]

Also, if I select "Yes, decrypt the disks", it prompts me to select which disks. And none show on the drop down menu:

But if I select "No, continue with import", on the next tab when I have to select "pool to import", nothing shows on the drop down menu either.

I'm not sure how to proceed.

 

[Arwen]

Sorry, I have no answer for you. If you never used GELI, then you should not be selecting it. I don't know why your pool does not show up. Perhaps someone else will have a suggestion.

 

[Decess]

Sorry, I have no answer for you. If you never used GELI, then you should not be selecting it.

I think I definitely never used GELI. I read that "TrueNAS replaced GELI encryption with ZFS native cryptography in the version 12.0 release"

I never used any version older than 13.x

I probably used ZFS native cryptography when setting everything up.

I don't know why your pool does not show up. Perhaps someone else will have a suggestion.

=(

I hope so.

Thank you for answering anyway.

 

[Arwen]

If you can import your pool from the command line, and get access to all data, then it is un-likely to have native ZFS encryption.


In general, people who want / need data encryption should have both good backups and trouble shooting skills. We occasionally get people who made a mistake, and now have self imposed ransomware. Some actually thought we could supply a back door to their encrypted data... Sorry if that is your case.

 

[Decess]

If you can import your pool from the command line, and get access to all data, then it is un-likely to have native ZFS encryption.


In general, people who want / need data encryption should have both good backups and trouble shooting skills. We occasionally get people who made a mistake, and now have self imposed ransomware. Some actually thought we could supply a back door to their encrypted data... Sorry if that is your case.

How do I try to import it from the command line? zpool import "poolname"? Like "zpool import tank"?

I believe I have encrypted my data. I know the decryption key for it. It is basically the same key/password I've set to everything when configuring TrueNAS. It is the password I use to login to the web gui and the password I use to log in to the mapped drive that shows in my Windows Explorer.

I'm not very sure which mistake I could have made. Everything was working as expected before the power outage =(

I thank you again for your attention.

 

[Arwen]

How do I try to import it from the command line? zpool import "poolname"? Like "zpool import tank"?
...

Yes.

...
I believe I have encrypted my data. I know the decryption key for it. It is basically the same key/password I've set to everything when configuring TrueNAS. It is the password I use to login to the web gui and the password I use to log in to the mapped drive that shows in my Windows Explorer.

I'm not very sure which mistake I could have made. Everything was working as expected before the power outage =(

I thank you again for your attention.

If you are able to import your pool, then you can use the following command to see it their is any encryption. From the example, you can see my "rpool" has encryption turned off.

> zfs get all -r | grep -i cryp rpool encryption off default

If you have encryption, then I can't help further because their are GUI tasks needed that I've never used nor looked at.

 

[Decess]

Yes.

So this is what happened:

I followed the instructions:

And this showed up in my notifications:

After this, tank was back online:

But I couldn't connect to it using Windows Explorer. I was getting an error which I didn't "print screened". But a quick reset of my NAS machine fixed it and I'm now back to being able to see all my data. So everything is fixed, I believe!

Thank you very much for your help.

If you are able to import your pool, then you can use the following command to see it their is any encryption. From the example, you can see my "rpool" has encryption turned off.

> zfs get all -r | grep -i cryp rpool encryption off default

If you have encryption, then I can't help further because their are GUI tasks needed that I've never used nor looked at.

About this, what am I doing wrong?

One word of warning, those Western Digital hard drives are SMR, (Shingled Magnetic Recording), and not really suitable for use with ZFS. They have been known to cause problems for many other people. But, let us get access to your data before we get in depth with this problem.

And circling back to this. What problems should I expect by using those WD HDs? Is there any way to protect myself from such problems or should I just buy new HDDs?

I thank you again for your attention. Thank you very very much!

 

[Whattteva]

About this, what am I doing wrong?

View attachment 63648

You don't need the "-r" option. Get rid of it and the command should work.

And circling back to this. What problems should I expect by using those WD HDs? Is there any way to protect myself from such problems or should I just buy new HDDs?

Those SMR drives are terribad for performance and should be avoided really at all costs, particularly in any RAID capacity. Unfortunately, no real way of mitigating this other than replacing the drives.

 

[WI_Hedgehog]

SMR is generally horrible in COW filesystems when it comes to random-writes (not necessarily at first, but after reaching 25% disk capacity). Your worst-case scenario would be something like 5-wide RAID-Z2 pool on SMR drives for e-mail server storage.
(12-wide Z3 would result in server suicide, so let's stay with reasonably likely scenerios)

Shingled magnetic recording - Wikipedia

en.wikipedia.org

 

[Arwen]

@Decess - Glad you seem to have gotten your pool back.

I don't know why you needed to drop the last transaction group(s), (aka the last 20 seconds of writes). ZFS is purposefully designed such that a unexpected power loss or crash won't cause pool in-consistency.

You might want to post the output from zpool status tank here, after the scrub has finished. If their are any odd things, we may be able to spot them and advise further.

 

[Decess]

@Decess - Glad you seem to have gotten your pool back.

I don't know why you needed to drop the last transaction group(s), (aka the last 20 seconds of writes). ZFS is purposefully designed such that a unexpected power loss or crash won't cause pool in-consistency.

You might want to post the output from zpool status tank here, after the scrub has finished. If their are any odd things, we may be able to spot them and advise further.

I ended up not using it much, so I forgot to do this. I was waiting until I could get my hands on a nobreak.

And then I got one. But it wasn't strong enough to handle my PC + NAS and it shutdown on me.

This happened a couple weeks ago. So I unplugged everything from the nobreak, put it back on the wall and just kept using my PC normally without even touching my NAS.

Today I decided to turn it on to check on some files and I was having the exact problem I had which led me to start this thread. My pool "tank" was offline again.

I went through everything in this thread, did the same checks to see if the problem was really the same and then tried to replicate the solution. This time, instead of 10 seconds of lost data, it was saying I'd get 84 seconds. I was fine with it and hit my system with the "zpool import -F tank" once again.

This time it didn't work. It started doing whatever it does but then restarted the system, landing me back to where I started. Same 84 seconds being lost were reported to me, so I tried the -F again. It again tried doing something but just restarted one more time.

So I decided to record my NAS screen to be able to pause the video and read it to try to figure out what was happening before it restarted itself. I set up a phone recording it and hit the import -F again. This time something different happened. I got stuck in a bootloop.

And I don't know what to do.

Any tips?

I'm starting to think this NAS universe isn't suited for a layperson like me.

 

[Decess]

Bootloop

www.youtube.com

 

[Arwen]

No, sorry, I can't help further. Perhaps someone else can.

Well, except if you are using any over-clocking, disable it. Servers run better as stock parts.

 

[WI_Hedgehog]

Looking into this there are a few hardware things that will probably cause a few issues (though they are easily rectified by adding two inexpensive cards, an LSI HBA and a better network card):

ASUS M5A78L-M Motherboard

Serial ATA 3.0Gb/s connectors (7-pin SATA3G_1~6)
These connectors connect to Serial ATA 3.0 Gb/s hard disk drives via Serial ATA 3.0 Gb/s signal cables. If you install Serial ATA hard disk drives, you can create a RAID 0, RAID 1, RAID 10 and JBOD configuration through the onboard controller.

What's all the noise about HBAs, and why can't I use a RAID controller?

1) An HBA is a Host Bus Adapter. This is a controller that allows SAS and SATA devices to be attached to, and communicate directly with, a server. RAID controllers typically aggregate several disks into a Virtual Disk abstraction of some sort...

www.truenas.com

Realtek 8111H Gigabit LAN Controller

Is my Realtek ethernet really that bad?

This resource was originally created by user: jgreco on the TrueNAS Community Forums Archive. Please DM this account or comment in this thread to claim it. One of the longest running issues faced here in the forums may be people who come to these forums, wanting to recycle an old PC into a NAS...

www.truenas.com