USB stick died - FreeNAS reloaded - Need guidance to import volume

[Travis Jacobsen]

I'm completely new to FreeNAS, today is the first day I've used it so be gentle. :) Thank you in advance for any kind soul willing to help!

I inherited our FreeNAS install from a former colleague who set it up in our office on a Dell PowerEdge 2950 with a Perc 6/i controller. Long story short, the USB thumb drive that FreeNAS was installed on lost it's mind and it's completely gone... no backed up config file to import... nothing.

I have no idea what version of FreeNAS was installed before it went belly up but I remember it being setup sometime in the winter of 2014 so I hit the repositories and grabbed 8.2.0 since it's dated January 2014

I was able to get 8.2.0 installed on a new thumb drive and I'm trying to import the existing volumes. I hate to sound like a wuss but I'm terrified of doing an import and losing what data is on the volumes as it's critical to us.

Auto-Import doesn't list any volumes. Import Volumes lists 'mfid0p2' as an 8TB volume so I'm hopeful it's seeing the volume presented through the Perc 6/i card. I don't know what file system type to import it as though. My options are:

UFS
NTFS
MSDOSFS
EXT2FS

Any guidance would be greatly appreciated. As a last question, if the volume gets imported with the wrong file system type will that cause data loss?

 

[danb35]

As a preliminary matter, once you do get the volume imported, you'll want to copy the data off it, get rid of the hardware RAID controller, and rebuild the volume without it--they're strongly discouraged with FreeNAS, and dangerous to your data.

For the next point, avoid the volume manager--you'd use that to create new volumes (formatting the disks) or add disks to an existing volume, both of which would destroy any data already on the disks.

Now, to the question you actually asked--if the server wasn't using ZFS, it was almost certainly using UFS. On the off chance it wasn't, choosing the wrong filesystem type when trying to import a volume won't harm any data on the disk; the import will just fail.

And (almost) finally--if the data is critical to you, you really should have a backup. Things happen, and even well-designed, robust servers fail sometimes.

Assuming you to get the volume imported, spend some time reading through the hardware recommendations threads, the n00bs guides, and other docs. For the best data security, you'd want to be running ZFS, probably in a RAIDZ2 array, on adequate hardware. You will likely have some changes to make.

 

[Travis Jacobsen]

Thanks for the info danb, I get the following when trying to import the volume on any filesystem type: "The selected disks were not verified for this import rules."

I read in another forum post that this was an issue in 8.02 but I'm running 8.2.0. Would be okay to just load up 9.3 and give it a try?

 

[cyberjock]

I'm not sure if you've resolved your issue or not.

I wouldn't try loading up 9.3. I'd focus on finding out what file system you were using. UFS isn't supported on 9.3, so if you were using that you'll have more problems.

I'd stick with 8.2.0. But, I will say that things aren't in your favor as you're using hardware that isn't really supported (ala hardware RAID). Your data may or may not be okay, and since the person that built the server has already ignored one major cardinal rule there's no way to know what other weird, backwards, totally bizarre things he did with your server.

Frankly, I'd find the old colleague that built the system and get him to help you fix it. Then punch him in the balls for giving you such a bad setup to inherit. :P