So my freenas home server started having some errors on 1 of the 4 drives in my ZFS pool. Yes I was stupid and wanted the most capacity possible so I didn't have redundancy setup. Well after a shutdown and moving the server it no longer will boot freenas, giving me a I/O error on one of the drives.
1.) If I reinstalled FreeNAS to the usb it was on and then attempt to import the data set could that possibly work?
2.) If not what method would ya'll recommend for recovering data. I don't need the server to actually run anymore, i just need to get some of the data off the disks.
I literally haevn't touched the server since it didn't boot the first time I tried. I didn't want to risk further issues if possible.
Feel free to fuss at me for not having proper redundancy set-up, I should know better. Any help anyone can give is appreciated. Thanks all!
Seeing as all data is striped between the 4 drives, you'll need to get that one drive working again before you can extract anything. So fixing the failed drive is the only way you'll ever get that data off.
Not sure how to sort that out without resorting to Wendell-like levels of witchcraft or taking it to a data recovery firm.
I don't think you'll be able to get the data back, as @anon37371794 said it is striped across all 4 drives if one of them fails you can not recover the data unless you can get that drive to spin up long enough to boot and transfer data to a secondary destination.
I actually had a similar situation a few months ago but was using a redundant configuration, one drive failed out of the 5 drives and the server went into limp mode (diminished state) I grabbed the serial number of the bad drive from the disk info within FreeNas and shut the server down, replaced the drive and booted back up, ran the re-silvering command and it rebuilt the pool all while still functioning and doing it's job serving up data.....it was rather easy, but if I'd lost two drives at the same time I would have been in the same situation you are.
I wish you good luck.
What drives are installed?
If they are Seagate, Seatools for DOS has literally brought drives back from the dead for me, I don't know if WD or Hitachi has anything similar because all I buy and have used since the 2000s are Seagate.
Make sure you DO NOT run a zero fill, just do an error check.
Might be worth making an image of the disk with something like ddrescue before you try to fix it in case you make it worse.
Thanks for all the responses guys. I figured the case was doomed but I had to ask around to be sure. It's a western Digital 1Tb Green Drive, I was given two a few months back and the one in question started throwing out some read errors in freenas a few weeks back but everything seemed ok, yadda yadda, excuses excuses... ff a few weeks and it just doesn't boot freenas at all anymore. Oddly though it still wont boot even if i disconnect all the drives, which seems odd to me. Shouldn't FreeNAS still boot with no storage drives attached? Could a bad USB drive with freenas installed to it cause errors that would appear as drive failures, aka the usb is bad or the image on it is corrupted?
Once again thanks for the great responses and feedback.
And yes I love seatools, using it as I type this to test a customers hdd's. (I do IT stuff for a living, just not data recovery and my Linux-fu is still kinda weak.)
And NO the FreeNAS was not holding anything work related, only my own personal files and my PLEX movie and tv database. Almost a TB of movies/shows, and several thousand pictures, and all my Presonus Studio One recordings and multitracks. I will be very sad if I loose it all, but it's still not worth paying for data recovery.
Thanks!!!
It's worth the effort to try another USB stick with a fresh install of FreeNas and see if you can import the drive pool, maybe like you said it is a USB issue and the drive might still be recoverable....worth a shot.
That was a hope of mine, I just wanted to ask the community here, which I know there are people more familiar with FreeNAS than myself. I didn't want to attempt that and basically screw myself. Did that once a long time ago when a 3tb drive (it wasnt GPT) did crazy stuff after removing it from the MYBOOK enclosure. I lost over 2 TB of data that time as well, but that because i tried to recover the data myself with no experience and i wrote new data to the drive without realizing it. Needless to say I was screwed so I have been super cautious ever since (well except for not using redundancy in my ZFS pool **stupid -bangs head on desk.)
I'd guess you checked your BIOS to make sure it's still set to boot from USB?
Yes absolutly. I guess I should correct myself, it attempts to boot but cant complete the boot, ends up just listing device errors over and over and it keeps retrying. Oddly though the same errors happen when no storage drives are plugged in at all.
One other note I can make is that I did a platform swap for this server just before I started having issues, but the first boot-up after that change everything worked 100%. It was the next reboot where the failure occurred. As soon as my test bench is free later I will try to boot it and grab a screen shot of the errors and post it here.
Yeah, I'd try a different USB stick and a fresh install, nothing to loose but your effort.
Good Luck!
These things really do not like being in a raid (or raid like) configuration. I had a similar issue when I was using 8 of these, they all failed within a month of each other.
Update: The error preventing boot was due to the usb drive that FreeNas was installed on. I re-installed a fresh copy and it worked fine. I was able to import the disks and get all my data backed up elsewhere. Now what to do with this PC is the question?
Thanks for advice/help from everyone.