System Crashes/How to safely move to new Hardware

[TheBrawnyMan]

I have a FreeNAS machine with 6 3TB drives in a RaidZ2 configuration thats behaving eradically/crashes after only a few minutes from startup. The system just shuts off, no warnings, which leads me to belive its power system related. I've ordered replacement hardware thinking its either a motherboard issue or powersupply issue (despite the powersupply testing ok). I'm also running a rather out of date version of FreeNAS (8.2 or 8.3 I think). I had attempted to do a GUI update to a newer version a while back, but this didn't work out, so its possible that something is damaged in my FreeNAS image, but I don't know how I would diagnose this. I've turned the system off until hardware comes, and potentially I can receive some advice/help. I have the following questions/concerns:

1) When the system is booting it throws warnings during post about the drives not being properly dismounted (due to the fact that the system essentially lost power and went down hard). Is this a problem? Can drives that have not been properly dismounted in a previous shutdown be imported into a new system.

2) Its obviously ideal, but assuming its not safe to do given the current system, is it safe to import the drives/volume without first exporting it from the current system? I've never attempted an export and don't know how long that process takes, and my concern would be attempting to export the volume, and then losing power in the middle of the export and corrupting the array.

3) Assuming its safe to import without first exporting, and assuming that the not dismounting first thing isn't a problem, will importing the drives on a system running a fresh image of the latest FreeNAS (9.2.1.4.1 is the latest as of this writing) be a problem coming from an old version. I know that ZFS has undergone updates in the newer versions of FreeNAS, so I would need to upgrade my array to the new version (or not depending on some things I've read, I don't use encryption for example) but would this process be a problem given the first 2 questions/points.

Any help would be greatly appreciated. I've done enough research to get myself into this mess, but am not finding the answers to get myself out :).

 

[warri]

If the pool is not damaged yet, you should be able to auto-import it into a new system even without exporting it first.

And as you already know, you don't have to upgrade your pool version - and a pool upgrade always is a manual action explicitly invoked from the command line.