Restore and pool recovery

[MGB-James]

Hi,
I built an 8-disk system about 4 years ago on FreeNAS 9.X. About 2 months ago my motherboard died. I don't know what caused it (the system was on an UPS) and I don't have the smarts to know if my pools were also damaged. I installed a new motherboard and CPU and powered it up without any drives attached. It got as far as "Beginning ZFS volume imports". It told me that "no such pool exists" and to "destroy and re-create the pool from a backup source"
Then it said "Loading kernel modules:" and hanged there.
I tried it again with the disks attached and got the same exact results.
As I never got around to backing up my system, my prime concern is how to go forward with utmost care given towards preserving the data on the drives. I'm going to need some serious hand-holding as I am not good at this sort of thing. I can provide a picture of the screen where it hangs, as well as all my system info. Is the best path forward a clean install of the latest version of FreeNAS? If so, can someone walk me through recovering the drives as pools on a new install?

Thanks in advance,
V/R
James

J.

 

[danb35]

Is the best path forward a clean install of the latest version of FreeNAS?

Probably.

If so, can someone walk me through recovering the drives as pools on a new install?

9. Storage — FreeNAS®11.2-U7 User Guide Table of Contents

www.ixsystems.com

 

[blueether]

As this wasn't a clean shutdown the pool maynot import from the GUI, this is not a problem so don't panic

 

[danb35]

As this wasn't a clean shutdown the pool maynot import from the GUI

Why would these two things be related?

 

[blueether]

I'll admit that I'm probably wrong, but I was of the understanding that a new install with non-exported pool may need the f flag?

 

[danb35]

Ah, yes, that's possible--not so much as a result of a dirty shutdown, but as a matter of being imported into a "new" system. I'd like to think the middleware would handle that automatically, but there's a lot of stuff I'd like to think it'd handle on its own that it doesn't.

 

[MGB-James]

Sooo, at the risk of sounding totally incompetent, how do I import a non-exported pool via shell commands?

p.s. so am I to assume that no pool information is contained on the FreeNAS boot disk? All of the pool info is self-contained on the pool drives?
p.s.s Do the pool disks need to be connected in the same order of SATA ports as they were on the original system?

 

[danb35]

Sooo, at the risk of sounding totally incompetent, how do I import a non-exported pool via shell commands?

zpool import -f poolname. But try it from the GUI first.

All of the pool info is self-contained on the pool drives?

Correct.

Do the pool disks need to be connected in the same order of SATA ports as they were on the original system?

No.

 

[MGB-James]

Hi again. So I just installed the latest version of FreeNAS, and I can access the web interface with no problems. I installed the OS without any of the pool drives attached as I was afraid I would accidentally overwrite them somehow during the install. Once I reattach the drives and reboot, do I have to mount them somehow, or will the OS detect the drives automatically and mount them?

If you look at my screen pic above from the old install, you'll see that it tried to import both "Jewell Home Server" and a 20-character item. What is that 20-character item, and do I need to worry about it when installing pools via the web interface?

 

[blueether]

attach disks
start freenas
if the pool imports my it's self all good
if not then tey to add the pool from the GUI
is still not the you might have to import from the CLI (see above)

 

[MGB-James]

So, the GUI doesn't list any pools to import, and under the disk tab it only lists the OS thumb drive.

 

[MGB-James]

I tried the shell command and it told me "no such pool available"

 

[danb35]

What's the output of zpool import?

 

[MGB-James]

Nothing....zilch. No output. I've also noticed that the drives attached directly to the motherboard do not show up in BIOS.

 

[danb35]

I've also noticed that the drives attached directly to the motherboard do not show up in BIOS.

That doesn't sound good. What about camcontrol devlist?

 

[MGB-James]

So three months have passed, and believe it or not, I had two server cases with bad backplanes for the hard drives. I got suspicious when I noticed that BIOS couldn't see all the drives. I bought my third case last week, installed everything, and the BIOS sees all 8 drives and I was able to import my pool with no problem.
Unfortunately, while I can see the webGUI via IP address, I cannot access any of my shares.