Pool will only import read-only: What next?

[funkmuffin]

Hi! I've had a freenas box running now for about 3 years and last night I noticed that I was unable to get to the web interface. My data was still accessible, but since I needed to do some admin, I hard booted the box.

It never came back up. It was failing at "mounting local file systems". So I put a newer version of FreeNas on a different USB stick and am now able to boot. But I cannot import my pool in any other mode than read only - all else results in a system crash and reboot.

Once imported, I can see that _all_ of my data appears to be fine. I just can't load it up in read/write to actually use it.

What are the next steps? Any help will be very much appreciated!

 

[cyberjock]

Well, sounds like your pool got toasted somehow. You provided no hardware. Any chance you were using <6GB of RAM?

To recover you should copy your data to a new pool and destroy the old one.

 

[funkmuffin]

Nope, 8 GB ram. HW is fairly run of the mill intel guts - I don't frankly remember - grabbed everything one afternoon 3 years ago at Microcenter.

So, I'm thinking about copying everything to a new pool... Do I build another whole machine, new drives etc. put both on the same network and just FTP the data over? I think I can make that happen, after buying new drives of course. If I have a pool on 3 drives, can I move those same drives to a new chassis, boot FreeNas, then import and go?

Is there a better/faster way?

Thanks!

 

[cyberjock]

So, I'm thinking about copying everything to a new pool... Do I build another whole machine, new drives etc. put both on the same network and just FTP the data over? I think I can make that happen, after buying new drives of course. If I have a pool on 3 drives, can I move those same drives to a new chassis, boot FreeNas, then import and go?

Any one of those you want. The only thing I would recommend against is doing ZFS snapshots and replication. If your zpool is corrupt (which it seems to be) then you don't want that corruption moving over to the new pool.
Also, keep in mind that even if a pool is mounted "read-only" it is not truly read-only. It is read-only in that YOU can't write to the pool. But lets pretend you want to stream a movie and do other things in the meantime. If ZFS finds corruption it *will* attempt to fix the corruption. There is the possibility that your pool might degrade further just by reading data on the pool because of this behavior. So be warned you are already on borrowed time. If you're going to need a few weeks to get the cash to get the drives I'd recommend you shutdown your FreeNAS box until you can get the new disks in place. If you have really important data on the pool I'd consider backing it up before you shutdown, just in case.

Edit: And for the record, you should take a read at why you shouldn't be using RAIDZ1. I bet if you weren't using RAIDZ1 right now you wouldn't be in the predicament you are currently in. ;)