USB boot disk degraded, can create mirror, but cannot detach degraded disc

[MrHUU]

Hi,

I've been trying to figure this out this problem for a whole day now, but I'm feeling that no-one haven't had identical problem than I'm facing in here (even many cases does have many similarities). At least I haven't found any solution which would help me.

I've read this forum, manuals and other web pages, but nothing seems to help. OrI just havent found the right answer, yet...

So, the problem is that freenas is installed in single USB memory, which now gives errors and status have turned to degraded. After that I mirrored boot drive, which appears to be successful. Desilvering takes about 40 minutes to complete. After that I have tried to remove old, degraded drive. But all I get is following error shown on attachment.

My last attempt and hope to fix everything, was to reinstall freenas to new USB drive. That succeed, and I were able to import old settings. But, importing the encrypted volume failed. I read about this problem, only to find out that most likely this is a know bug where you cannot do this operation thru GUI (and zpool status gave nothing on command-line). After that I decided to change original USB drive to server. Now everything runs just fine again, except boot disk is degraded and I still cant detach this drive. But I cant live like this for ever, since if drive fails and I cannot import the file system, I have bunch of files and photos worth of nothing. My backup server is under work, but have had problems with the motherboard KVM.

I also tried to update to latest version, but when 11.1 U5 is activated, it wont change after bootup like it should, but U4 will be still running reboot. This must be caused by the problems with USB drive.

Any ideas, what to do next?

 

[pro lamer]

Maybe both of them suffer some errors? Do you have a third one to try making a 3-way mirror to give a test?

(might end with 3-way mirror without possibility to detach any if the problem is more serious :( )

EDIT: Anyway I am rather a noob and
can't understand how come a faulty drive managed to mirror itself to a second one... It copied the errors to the mirror?

Sent from my mobile phone

 

[MrHUU]

I have 4 new unpacked USB memory, which I bought today. I have tested only one, but no big deal to test one more. I'm going to need 2 anyway at the end, since original memory will go to recycling after this problem is solved.

At the begin, I had only one USB memory (boot). Today I tried to make a mirror to second USB memory. So, there is two USB memorys not (original 8GB, new 16GB)

 

[pro lamer]

Are you able to identify which files have errors? If they are standard system files: Maybe you can restore (copy) them manually from a drive with a fresh install?

Sent from my mobile phone

 

[MrHUU]

[MiddlewareError: [EFAULT] 3-way mirror not supported yet]

So, that didn't help much... But at least, that been tried now.

 

[MrHUU]

Unfortunately I don't have a clue which files are affected, if any. Have to continue tomorrow, it is 2 am already on here.

Thank you for your help.

 

[MrHUU]

I'm pretty sure that silvering doesn't complete all the way, and that is why i get error "no valid replicas". So as you suspected, faulty drive cant manage replicate itself.

So, what next... I don't want to loose my files. Somehow I have to try to figure out how to reconfigure clean install of the freenas.

 

[pro lamer]

don't have a clue which files are affected

At least not the encryption key...

anyway do you have a backup copy of the keys?

Somehow I have to try to figure out how to reconfigure clean install of the freenas

I think it's a good idea.

I am not aware of the bug you mentioned but if it's still there there are some threads in our forums describing manual or self manual key restoration or recovery. The key is stored in a special partition of the boot drive...

Before applying them I would try gui methods again including config upload...

Sent from my mobile phone

 

[MrHUU]

I have geli.key and passphrase for the encryption, and freenas configuration file stored on my local computer. So that part should be in order...

Maybe I can figure this out in next few hours.

 

[pro lamer]

I don't have a clue which files are affected

You may find some help on how to find them in this thread:

You should do as suggested by the first run of the command and run it again with -v to see which file is potentially lost or corrupt.